Ringway slashes reportable worker incidents by 20%

Ringway has achieved a 20% annual reduction in reportable incidents over the past three years in its drive to change worker behaviour and attitudes to health and safety across the company.
The group, which was recently awarded four out of four in its recent Capability Assessment Toolkit evaluation on safety by the Highways Agency, has now set itself an ambitious 50% reduction target for the coming year.
Much of the health and safety success at Ringway has come from the nine-step performance audit the company carries out on a monthly basis across the group's 12 businesses.
Conducted by trained in-house auditors, the exercise involves observing worker behaviour on the network, which is then fed back through monthly reviews into Ringway's health and safety board, headed up by Ringway's managing director David Lee.
On-site workers also have to go through the nine steps of the behaviour checklist with a trained audit observer. This includes getting operatives on site to look closely at their daily activity, asking them what is the worst thing that can happen to them at work, and to identify bad practice and how it can be corrected.
"It's all about getting people to think before they act," Ringway's health and safety manager David Campbell said. "Most workers are thinking about the football match last night, rather than the implications of lifting something heavy, or jumping down from a moving truck. Manual handling accounts for 25% of injuries."
Last December, Ringway ramped up its local health and safety meetings for workers after noticing a peak in incidents over the Christmas period. The contractor has also introduced 10 safety values for workers to adhere to, which have now become "conditions of employment" at the company.
"We take this very seriously and have not been dissuaded in the past to come down heavily with disciplinary actions against those who think that health and safety isn't important," Campbell added.
Ringway also carries out staff questionnaires following an acquisitions or contract win to test the health and safety opinions of new staff brought into the group. This is then reassessed a year on to judge whether the contractor's safety culture is seeping in.