| Going For Gold – Bringing it all together |
DESCRIPTION
Lafarge Aggregates and Concrete developed an innovative scheme based on an Olympic theme to drive up safety standards across its business. The challenge was to involve and motivate employees across all sites to participate in improving safety whilst reducing the demands in terms of time and paperwork created by the existing systems.
“Going for Gold” is a process based on sharing knowledge and mutual support. The initiative teamed up sites with exceptional safety records with less well performing sites and, with just one report to complete, made process tracking easier.
The business was split into 12 geographic, cross business units teams, each with a team leader and between 70 to 150 employees. The teams competed with each other to achieve gold, silver or bronze standards across all their sites. The standards were based around five core competencies subdivided into a further 35 categories. The team could only claim the level achieved by their lowest performing site. The teams and individuals were rewarded for their success in achieving the bronze, silver and gold standards. Monthly league tables were published showing the categories achieved by the teams.
Progress was monitored using a check list based self audit which were verified by safety experts making site visits at different stages in the process. The audits are both environmental and health and safety orientated and therefore count towards the requirements of ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001.
This scheme created a real ‘Buzz’ around the business with communication being at the very centre of its success. Teams were keen to share success and best practice in the monthly news letter and to monitor their position in the league tables.
BENEFITS
• Enhanced sharing of knowledge and best practice across the business
• Helped motivate all members of staff to be engaged in the management of safety
• Encouraged communication across different business units
• Improved safety performance whilst reducing more onerous nature of previous systems
• This approach is now being adopted by other parts of Lafarge’s business
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