Issue
Despite a committed and resourceful workforce the senior management team of Eastern Region had concerns about poor safety performance.  A safety culture survey indicated that whilst there was perceived to be a strong commitment to safety by senior management the message was getting lost.  In an arena of conflicting priorities safety sometimes lost.  There was a need to establish safety as a core value of the organisation at all levels, to shift the safety culture from reactive to proactive and to establish personal responsibility for safety as the norm. 

Solution
Step 1: The Safety Rope – establishing the critical mass
people=positive™ established a programme of 18 x 2.5 day Safety Leadership Workshops – The Safety Rope.  This experiential workshop invited participants to explore their personal relationship with safety and reflect on what safety meant to them and to the organisation.  Workshop participants were a diagonal slice from senior management to shop floor and across departmental boundaries.  Each workshop was kicked off and closed out by a senior member of the management team, which was seen as an essential condition for success.

Step 2: The Values Day – checking in with progress
After the first set of workshops, 60 participants were brought together to check in on progress and explore the safety values of the business.

Step 3: Safety Coach Training – making it theirs
people=positive™ gathered together 8 participants from the Safety Rope programme and held a 2 day training programme to develop with them a one day workshop. The safety coaches also received training in delivery and coaching skills.   They chose to call the programme “The Safety Tonic - a one day safety awareness workshop”.  This workshop was clearly branded as Vetco Gray and not people=positive™ in order to ensure that Vetco Gray employees took ownership of the safety culture programme. 

Step 4: The Safety Tonic – embedding the values
With the assistance of people=positive facilitators the Safety Coaches rolled out 37 x 1 day Safety Tonic workshops to the rest of the workforce.

Results

• A measurable and sustained improvement in safety performance across the business.
• Raised personal and interpersonal awareness.
• Personal changes in attitudes to safety and actions both at work and at home.
• Increasingly, safety is perceived as each individuals responsibility.
• Employees more comfortable in saying “no” and stopping the job on the grounds of safety.
• An improvement in communication and cooperation across departmental boundaries.
• A positive shift in the safety culture, and performance culture of the organisation.

Ron Burr of Vetco Gray Aberdeen commented:

 "The courses were well structured to suit the particular issues identified by Vetco and carried out in a manner that ensured the personnel understood what their involvement in safety would mean to them personally and to the Company as a whole."