2018 is another major milestone for Briggs Equipment in their quest to become an industry leader in Health and Safety. It marks the 5th year anniversary of their BE Safe campaign which has achieved a lot in such a short time.
To mark the anniversary, later this month on the 25th of September, Briggs will be hosting their 5th BE Safe Conference. ‘BE Safe 5’ will see all Operational Managers, H&S Representatives and Apprentices come together for the day at Loughborough University to talk about the company’s strategy around Safety and how they will continually take safety to the next level.
This year however, Briggs will be going one step further and transforming the month of October into ‘BE Safe Month’. As part of BE Safe Month, they will be introducing a new concept to their employees; BE Safe, Home Safe.
We caught up with Briggs’ National SHEQ Manager, Scott McGready, to find out more.
So what is BE Safe, Home Safe?
“Briggs’ BE Safe, Home Safe campaign is focused on helping engineers to re-align their thinking in relation to safety. We’re using this campaign to encourage our engineers to think about how the things they do (or don’t do) at work could have a catastrophic impact on their life outside of work (the important part of life) if an accident occurs.
“We want to place what’s important in life to the forefront of people’s minds so that when they evaluate a given situation, that they fully consider the bigger picture of the potential impact. In short it’s about making clear at every level that our number one priority is that we get home safe at the end of the day.”
Where did the idea come from?
“The idea was born through discussion with our Health and Safety Representatives. We get together regularly to talk about any issues, things we could improve on and just generally how we can improve safety in our business.
“The Health and Safety Reps themselves are engineers, so it’s always a great forum for discussion and insight. We’d been talking for a while about what they think about when they’re at work, before they start a job or most importantly when they’re presented with a challenge. It’s in these occasions we feel it’s easy to get engrossed in the situation and possibly start to lose sight of things that might cause you harm.
“By re-emphasising the bigger picture around what’s really important, we hope this help keep things in perspective.”
What do you have in store for BE Safe Month?
“BE Safe Month is predominantly about communication. It’s about having discussions and asking questions that might lead to individuals challenging and thus changing their thinking, mind-set or their approach when it comes to safety. The backbone of BE Safe Month will be 5 videos, each emphasising a key, thought provoking topic. These will be released via our e-learning package on each of the 5 Mondays in October so they can be watched remotely by our 650 home based Field Service Engineers.
“In between these videos, there will be heightened 1-2-1 discussion between line managers and employees and between Health and Safety Reps and employees around these topics and around how we can improve safety in general. In conjunction with this we have a structured internal marketing campaign planned to make sure the message is consistently in focus throughout the month and beyond. Earlier in the year we done some analysis on which communication channels work best for our engineers so although we will be utilising all means available we can really focus in on the ones that are most effective.
“We’re also launching our new interactive risk assessment tool that will allow engineers to do a simple and effective risk assessment at the start of each job. This is something that has been in development for some time so we’re really excited to be able to start the roll out.”