Low and Bonar

The Challenge

The company has been working hard on improving health and safety culture across their business. The company has manufacturing sites in many countries and wanted to ensure that all of its 2000+ employees had embraced the changes introduced to cut workplace accidents.

What did we do?

We worked in partnership with Low and Bonar to create a health and safety questionnaire that would glean data for the management team to see how their health and safety changes were viewed, and to gain further insight into the thoughts and minds of Plant Managers, Supervisors, Shift Leaders and HSE Professionals to boost engagement.

The survey was translated into numerous languages and reflected cultural differences to gain a clear picture of what was going on.

Results

Low and Bonar were delighted with the results as support for the improved health and safety programme was very strong. However the survey did also reveal some areas for improvement.

Action

Low and Bonar decided to delve deeper into the data and engage with their staff to really find out what the underlying issues were, and how they could help. Some issues were site specific, so created measures where local managers could action on a location by location basis. Other issues, such as training, were more over-arching, so a new training academy was established to support hands on health and safety training and professional development.

Thanks to the survey results, and the development of their health and safety programme, Low and Bonar has surpassed their interim health and safety targets. In November 2013 they had reduced their incident rate* (*accident causing an employee to be off work for three plus days) by more than 50% over 3 years!

The future

Low and Bonar will undertake another staff survey in the near future to look again at perceptions towards health and safety. The second survey results will be compared against the first set of results to identify the effects of their actions. Again the company will be calling upon the expert guidance of The Survey Initiative to steer them through the process and to delve into broader issues too.

“From the beginning of the process The Survey Initiative was key in helping us gain trust in the feedback process. By employing an external agency we knew our staff would be happier giving anonymous answers. Thanks to The Survey Initiative’s experience at managing multinational surveys they were also able to create a survey that would reflect local cultures and business practices as well as translating it into many different languages,”

Wayne Currie, Group Health, Safety and Environmental Director, Low and Bonar