Behavioural Safety Programme
The Power Industrial Group (PIGL), formerly PJD Group was founded by Peter Douglas over 25 years ago, and one of its earliest contracts was with client SSE, at Fiddlers Ferry power plant, in Warrington. Today, Fiddlers Ferry, and more specifically the organisation that owns and manages it, Scottish and Southern Energy, remains one of The Power Industrial Group's most important clients. 50% of staff at Fiddlers Ferry is SSE staff. Of the other 50%, PIGL is the main contractor within an Alliance of around eleven contractors with its workforce on site all year providing repair and maintenance cover as well as leading intensive Repair and renewal works in summer "Outages"to ensure uninterrupted service,
In this film, we look specifically at how an innovative knowledge transfer programme, based around health and safety at Fiddlers Ferry, is influencing procedurally the way things are operated on site.
What underpins this culture is a change in the behaviour of every member of PIGL's contracted workforce. Now, through this culture change programme, PIGL is proactively reducing any safety incidents (and by definition, thefinancial implications that accidents can cause in lost time etc)
This culture change programme has been carried out in partnership with other stakeholders -- Scottish and Southern Energy, the plant's owners; and also the British Safety Council, culture change specialists, who haveprovided training to staff on site and a data base for managing information collected. The third partner is Manchester Metropolitan University, who are providing research and academic support to affect the knowledge transfer partnership between academia and industry. The behaviour safety programme is being developed and adapted by the Power Industrial Group so it can be applied to different contexts.
So how does this culture change programme work?
The four stakeholders have identified that conversation is the strongest tool to change a deep-rooted culture. There is an inherent risk in the work the people are carrying out. Whereas the risk cannot be reduced, it is the desire of everyone concerned to keep safety incidents to a minimum and they have discovered that this can be done by employees having positive conversations with each other -- not just those people who are doing the work, but all the way through the company, starting with the directors and management. They key is to understand the potential consequences of ones actions. This creates an emotional response at (i), a physiological level, and (ii), at a sociological level. In other words, it must be understood how actions affect the individual and the community of workers. Everybody on site is challenged in this way, and they are encouraged to observe and challenge other people if they see something wrong or amiss.
The tone of conversation between one worker and another is changed. It is no longer confrontational; rather it's supportive. The goal is to understand why someone is working in a particular way, rather than chastising them if what they are doing is wrong. This improves the social capital of the workforce through better hazard recognition, and the upshot is increased prevention of accidents.
The way this is implemented is through coaching, followed by regular refresher courses, and an emphasis on observation. Everybody is responsible for everybody else's health and safety.
At present, this project is being carried out at Fiddlers Ferry, but the long term goal is to implement it at every plant where Power Industrial Group has an active workforce. with the help of other stakeholders, SSE, British Safety Council and Manchester Metropolitan University,. A successful programme has to be for the long term benefit of society as a whole, and MMU, in partnership with PIGL, is committed to developing and adapting the system so it can be applied to a wide range of contexts, wherever health and safety is a priority.