The initial survey results highlighted some concerns around employees feeling confident to speak up and implement safety standards. This didn’t align with the company’s ethos of ‘Making safety our priority,’ which focused on ensuring people feel safe at work and feeling empowered to challenge unsafe behaviour and stop a job.
In response to these findings, the following year Stonbury launched Empowerment Cards. One card authorises an individual to stop any work activity that they believe cannot be undertaken safely. The cards are signed and authorised by Chief Operating Officer, Ian Mellor, empowering all employees to challenge and ask questions and, if necessary, stop work if they feel that the task they are asked to do is unsafe.
As a result of the cards being introduced, Stonbury have seen a 31% increase in employees feeling empowered to stop any work activity that is unsafe, and a 12% increase in employees who feel safe to challenge the way things are done.
Stonbury also now think about safety in broader terms than just basic physical health and safety – they consider mental health, psychological safety, and how they create a culture of inclusivity worthy of consideration/just as important.
By using the surveys, Stonbury have reinforced terminology used internally to help them start conversations as their surveys close and have embedded their new ethos of “Be safe, be healthy and be kind”.
Stonbury also make use of the WorkBuzz platform’s ability to use logic to ask on-site employees different questions – very much focusing on their PPE offering where many valuable responses were returned. This has enabled them to set up a PPE and Workwear Taskforce – making a huge difference to ensure PPE is right for site workers and improving engagement.
More than these results, Stonbury feel differently about their safety culture now.
“There’s always work to do, but there is more of a willingness for employees to disclose errors of judgement – honest errors aren’t punished, but there is more of a focus on how we learn from them and make improvements. It’s shifted the responsibility of health safety from appointed officers with clipboards, to making EVERYONE responsible for it,” said Loraine Thomas, Director of People and Culture.
