Stonbury is an agile, direct delivery specialist contractor to both the water industry and wider water environment, with an emphasis on delivering innovative, low carbon and high-quality reliable solutions.
75% decrease in RIDDOR incidents
68% decrease in minor injuries
AFR (Accident Frequency Rate) has reduced from 0.64 to 0.25
EMEA Inspiring Workplaces Awards - Bronze Winner - Inspiring Culture Award
Why WorkBuzz?
“I came across WorkBuzz (Smith & Henderson at the time) when I Google-searched ‘employee engagement’ – they were at the top of the listings, so I took a look and was impressed by the brands they work with. I really liked how they came across as accessible and it was clear that they had the ability to support smaller organisations and not just large corporates. I was really excited by their ability to provide a more tailored, bespoke service – they’re hugely flexible and don’t just shoehorn off-the-shelf solutions onto their clients. Finally, their ability to build trust with our workforce to get them to share open feedback by having a clear and confidentiality promise has been critical”.
Loraine Thomas, Director or People and Culture.
The Problem
In 2017, Stonbury’s Director of People and Culture, Loraine Thomas, recognised a need for the business to better support their people.
After completing research into employee engagement, Loraine identified that a surveying platform, which could elicit employee feedback and communicate results to the wider business would be a key driver for providing this support.
As part of the business case, it was imperative that the surveying platform could provide actionable insights and data-driven outcomes, which would be accepted by their board. Stonbury didn’t want this to be a tick box exercise, but something that would be used to drive new initiatives and processes to provide a better employee experience for their team.
The Solution
Stonbury reached out to WorkBuzz to discuss the requirements and goals for their employee engagement strategy. After the initial consultation, they were impressed with our employee engagement platform and its ability to provide a more tailored, bespoke service, which aligned with their needs as a business. Flexibility was going to be critical for the project to be a success.
To get things started, we recommended running a baseline survey to gain an understanding of what was working well and where improvements could be made. This provided a variety of valuable insights and offered a benchmark for growth for Stonbury.
Since their initial baseline survey, Stonbury have developed the way they listen to employees over time, moving away from the traditional annual surveys to more regular, quarterly pulses. They work closely with WorkBuzz to develop the question sets linked to changes in the business and take away insight from each results call with WorkBuzz on where to focus their efforts to maximise engagement and tackle challenges in the areas that need support.
The Outcome
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.