Health & safety bulletin
Well Done
30th October 2009
Unlike most safety bulletins, this one was not planned in advance, carries a positive message in that it is a thank you to all our employees for raising safety awareness to unprecedented levels within our business.
At last December's safety awareness day, we tried to raise the bar even further, having already raised safety awareness by increasing our toolbox talk activity by 106% and our near miss reporting by 77% on the previous year.
The spur for me to write this note is that this morning, I reviewed the 174th near miss reported by Xmo employees, which is exactly twice the number we generated in the whole of 2008; I strongly believe that this is a direct result of increased levels of discussion between us, increased toolbox talk activity and increased employee participation. I am particularly pleased with the calibre of near misses, the fact that more hazards than ever have been addressed and the danger mitigated at source and the fact that the number of near misses relating to subcontractors has reduced, whist ones relating to ourselves have increased, indicating increased levels of trust, confidence and honesty.
It is anecdotally clear that the IIF (Incident & Injury Free), Hearts & Minds and Talk Not Tick workshops that we have run internally this year have been embraced and we really are seeing genuine behavioral change from our employees and approved/accredited subcontractors.
As was communicated by text to all Xmo employees on Tuesday evening, this week was also very special in that we were awarded the 2009 Shell LCSC Talk Not Tick Performance Award at Shell's Manchester Office. As well as thanking all of our employees, I have also personally thanked representatives from Shell, Coteba and Johnson Controls, who provided the judges for this prestigious trophy.
I'll be happy to show each of you the award when you come into the office, but so you know what the Award looks like, the picture below depicts Michael Hunt, HSSE Manager for Shell UK presenting it to Kate and me.
Steve Martin
Managing Director, Xmo Strata
