Safe and sound in Ground Transportation

The award celebrates individuals who have made a ‘demonstrable difference’ in safety and accident prevention in the workplace.

The statistics speak for themselves. In 2011, hazard reports in the UK Ground Transportation business were less than 100. In 2013, more than 900 were reported, each one subject to investigation to ensure that a similar reoccurrence or a more serious incident was avoided. This massive increase in hazard reporting demonstrates that employees are taking safety seriously and actively seeking to make the workplace more secure.

Even more impressive is the fact that the business has achieved an Accident Frequency Rate (AFR) of zero with more than four million hours worked.

Making safety a priority

We caught up with Sarah as she reflects on the challenges she and her team of 20 have faced in radically changing the safety culture of the business, embedding it as a priority at every level, from the boardroom to the track.

Sarah says: “Transport is a highly-regulated industry, but it's also a high-risk industry. Without due care, it can quickly become an environment where accidents occur.

"My experience has taught me that you can have all the rules and regulations in the world, but that doesn't guarantee safety. Accidents will happen. People will not always follow the rules, or more likely, they will let their guard down.

“My responsibilities include ensuring we have a clear strategic direction with regards to a health, safety and environmental (HSE) culture that pervades right across the business – from the executive board to an apprentice coming through our training academy. Safety is everyone’s responsibility but we provide employees with clear communication, direction and support.

“Starting out in 2012, it was a massive challenge. Sometimes the transport industry is so heavily regulated you can make the mistake of thinking your people are protected but experience tells me you cannot rely on these rules and regulations. So we began a journey through a completely new governance process to establish ‘where are we really?’, ensuring a complete amnesty of our current situation but giving us a foundation from which to build.

“Level one was working with the executive leadership team to ensure there was the correct governance, compliance, safety culture and leadership in place to go forward, and that the members of the executive team genuinely led by example.

“The next stage was implementing a proper safety leadership culture at the Project Director and Project Manager level through clear communication, education, expectation-setting, accountability and again, leading by example. The right behaviour is absolutely key.

"The third level was ensuring we were reaching our people on the ground; those undertaking the actual work are invaluable in changing culture and promoting safe working, particularly when they understand the reasons behind it all. Throughout the process, we were continually educating and measuring to inform future activity, not just patting ourselves on the back when we got it right."

The challenges of the transport industry

“I’m incredibly lucky to have a great team that are committed to the culture change. Our transition has been driven by believing in compliance and taking personal responsibility and accountability; we're not enforcing change as the ‘safety police’.

“We have worked hard to understand why people behave in a certain way with regards to safety and make the mistakes they do. If you understand that, it’s possible to start addressing behaviours that can lead to incidents occurring, and improve them. We have tried to give people real direction, but more importantly, make them feel part of the journey, that they are empowered to work in a safer way.

“We have to be continuously focussed on safety. Our customer base spans a range of networks: trams, highways, underground and overground. And these environments come with a variety of diverse risks: limited night-shift hours, live electricity, working at height, within close proximity of moving trains and working alongside other contractors – it’s challenging.

"The work environments can be testing. For example, we can have an average of 100 engineers working down in the London Underground, repairing or upgrading signalling systems on lines that by day normally have 630 volts of DC electricity running through them. We have a limited window to work when the tube is closed to passengers from about 1am to 5am, with the pressure to finished in time to avoid any delays to the line.

“Against all of these kinds of issues, there is the constant balance of managing safe delivery and the implications of penalties if we do not hand back a working or repaired line to the customer when we said we will. It goes beyond the potential financial implications; the customer is faced with a reputational issue if the train, tram or tube is delayed or cancelled. It can be a pressurised environment to say the least!”

Becoming a Guardian Angel

Sarah’s safety background runs across the transport and construction industries, including Balfour Beatty and London Underground before her current role with Thales.

“My career in this field started in 1999 on the Underground and I quickly became fascinated by the concept of safety. Not the rules and regulations, but the culture and behavioural issues that existed in the actual working environment. Why do accidents happen and what do we learn? I am lucky to have spent lots of time on site during my career and I understand how challenging an environment it can be, to deliver day or night, in all conditions and with tight timescales.”

Sarah’s passion for safety was reinforced after experiencing a fatality in the workplace six years ago.

“Tthat drastically changed my perception of things. We have to get people to understand that it’s incredibly rare that anybody really breaks or bends any rule by choice. But it is that one relapse of concentration, that one slip of judgement that can have terrible ramifications.

“Our transport environment is fast moving and completely unforgiving. A rail track is an incredibly dangerous place to be in with the wrong mindset.

“We try to bring that to the forefront of our people’s minds – that if they get it wrong or are complacent, they might not be going home that day. It sounds melodramatic but it's about hazards and taking the appropriate action to report them and to ensure we are learning the lessons from them.

“But we mustn’t frighten people to the point that they are too scared to report accidents. You have to promote the benefits of a good safety culture, where you assess lessons learned in a fair and open manner. That became a clear winner for us, and our people bought in."

An award-winning strategy

“You set very clear objectives, but you don’t judge – it’s all about understanding the root causes of an incident then deciding the necessary action to try and ensure that it doesn’t happen again.

“I use a mixture of clear communication and psychology. We need to reach out and educate people, but in order to do that effectively, you must understand the way your employees think and behave.

“Traditionally, safety has a bit of a reputation for being tedious, so we have tried to make it a bit more relevant to our people. The ‘it’s never going to happen to me’ thinking was addressed by showing clear examples that would make people stop and think – how that everyday activity could slip into danger by the smallest wrong decision or mistake."

Reflecting on her success, Sarah says: “It was nice to be recognised with the Guardian Angel Award, though I do see it very much as recognition of a team effort.

“Yes, we’ve made massive strides, but if we start thinking ‘we’ve made it’, we’re running the risk of taking our focus off our safety culture and relaxing into thinking it’s ‘job done’. Safety in the transport environment is never ‘job done’, it’s never 9 to 5 and it never will be, not for anyone – and certainly not for Thales.”