Client stories: Balfour Beatty

This article is filed under: engagement, organisational culture, people

Tackling the tough stuff

Balfour Beatty’s Group Managing Director for Safety asked us to help him deliver a challenging corporate goal: to cut the risk of death and serious injury on all sites to zero within 4 years. The biggest challenge was to make the final shift to zero among the company’s 40,000 employees as well as its half a million sub-contractors.

The 26 operating companies each had their own safety targets, so depending on each other to deliver a shared goal was new. The deep-down acceptance that some injuries, even deaths, were inevitable in a dangerous business would have to go, to be replaced with personal conviction by every manager that, ‘I don’t accept it’.

Re-framing the challenge

The key was to re-define safety as a leadership issue. This meant lifting sights from the work sites to where Group decisions were made. Operating Companies were involved in the shaping of an early, rough draft of the vision for Zero Harm, ensuring thorough testing of the messages. Every operating company then produced a road map for achieving Zero Harm. Personal visits energised and inspired the individual companies, and identified the support the individual companies would need to achieve the goal of Zero Harm.

The core question was: ‘What is the single biggest, most impactful thing we can do now that will shift the whole system to the next level?’ The leadership support that’s been developed in response to that question is unprecedented in scale. Within 18 months, all 150 senior leaders will take part in a three-day experience called ‘Leading Change: Driving the Safety Agenda’.

Stanton Marris has worked in partnership with the Group Managing Director, his team, and Duke Executive Education. The ‘end of the beginning’ is a set of predictive measures for achieving Zero Harm by 2012 and sustaining it beyond. ‘Zero In’ is a simple approach to help each Operating Company assess how well it is performing on the key drivers of Zero Harm, to enable them to ‘zero in’ on the right things.

It’s working

Average Accident Frequency Rate across all Operating Companies in 2009 was 0.17 – down from 0.20 in 2008. Zero Harm is embedded in Operating Companies. And it’s strategic, committed to eliminating the risks of causing harm by removing root causes in the design and planning of the work.