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Lost time accident record
15 April 2014
Three hundred plus Stelrad employees working for the company at its manufacturing headquarters in Mexborough, South Yorkshire are celebrating a new health and safety record.
They’ve exceeded 550 days – nearly eighteen months - without a ‘time lost’ accident on the site. For a heavy manufacturing/engineering business with large quantities of steel being moved around the factory and a very busy National Distribution Centre, that’s quite an achievement and exceeds the previous record at the site by a huge amount.
Neil Land, the company’s health and safety manager comments: "This new record is mightily impressive. Our team here has been heavily motivated to build on their already impressive health and safety record and the schemes we run day in day out here, keeps health and safety awareness at the forefront of everyone’s minds in every area of the business.”
Neil joined Stelrad two and a half years ago and set about changing the health and safety culture within the business: "Many of the people working here have been with the company for more than twenty five years and getting them to think about health and safety in a very different way was difficult. We had to introduce a new approach to the way things happened here. The major driving force was the attitude of the people who do the work including the management team.
"You can’t expect the shop floor to change their attitudes if they don’t see management embracing changes and the success we’ve had has come about because we’ve been able to get management – right at the top of the business - and the shop floor teams to work together to drive health and safety at every level.”
Neil introduced an incentive scheme to encourage people throughout the business to report potential hazards around the factory and the site with a monthly awards to the top three ‘Hazardous condition spots’ decided on by the safety reps and senior management team.
As he says good health and safety is about spotting potential problems before they happen and doing something about them – not leaving them, hoping nothing untoward will happen: "We’ve got an excellent maintenance team here which is vital. Any potential issues reported that require machines to be repaired or guards to be replaced, these are prioritised and rectified immediately and this has been instrumental in ensuring that accidents with machinery in particular haven’t happened.”
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