Learning Legacy Podcast: Episode Four – Being safe and inclusive every step of the way
HS2 is focused not only on safety, but on the overall health and wellbeing of all employees and contractors. Identifying long term risks to wellbeing is a challenge within any industry. It’s a particular problem on construction sites, where people often move between projects and sites.
Episode 4 dives into some of the innovations and technology being implemented across the project. From monitoring site workers exposure to Hand Arm Vibration Syndrome, to understanding the approach in place at BBV to ensure teams are establishing an inclusive and safe culture for all employees.
Featuring:
- Fiona King – HS2, Head of Occupational Health and Wellbeing
- Timothy Callow – EKFB, SHW Advisor
- Alison Crawley – EKFB, Head of Occupational Health
- Bill Strachan – EKFB, Health Safety and Wellbeing Manager
- Chloe Chand – Diversifying Group, Lead Diversity and Inclusion Trainer (Former BBV, EDI Partner)
- Ben Hickman – BBV, EDI Partner
Fiona outlines the importance of occupational health. Monitoring a workers’ health from the design stages onwards allows teams to take action against signs of long-term health issues at the earliest moment.
Tim, Alison and Bill explain the journey of improving the problem of Hand Arm Vibration Syndrome of workers putting together a concrete batching plant, and the use of a React Tech vibration monitor device allowing managers to rethink their approach on the job.
Chloe and Ben walk us through BBV’s approach to ensure an equal and inclusive environment is achieved. From the 4 Golden Rules to ensuring any lack of understanding or awareness is addressed in a civil and respectful way. Inclusion of all when monitoring health and safety is critical to help continue to push the industry.
Find out more about HS2’s Learning Legacy Programme
Learning Legacy papers featured in this episode
- Control of hand and arm vibrations on HS2 and beyond
- Safe at Heart: establishing an inclusive and safe culture for our employees
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Episode transcript
This is a transcript of episode one of HS2’s Learning Legacy podcast, first published on 28 March 2023.
Fiona King 00:03
One of the most exciting things about this project—and probably what really attracted me—was that we’re actually trying to really emphasise the importance of looking at health from the very early stages of design, right through construction, and into, like, all the other maintenance all the other sectors.
But really, from the very onset, we’re thinking about health. So we’re trying to, we used to say we’re treating health like safety. But really what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to raise the profile of occupational health, so people understand the difference between occupational ill health and accidents. Because historically, they’ve kind of got a bit, you know, there’s great focus, great work has been done in safety, and health, we are getting there, we will have a lot more work to do.
Rhian Owen
That was Fiona King, Head of Occupational Health and Wellbeing, talking to us for the first series of How to Build a Railway, in an episode called Safe at Heart.
HS2 has focused across the project not just on safety, but on overall health and wellbeing. Identifying long term risks to wellbeing can be a challenge in any industry. It’s a particular problem on construction sites, where people often move between projects, sites, and employers.
Fiona King 01:23
It can take a long time for ill—particularly occupational—ill health to develop. So we might not see it for maybe 10 years, it could be 15, it could be even 20 years. And actually, we might have new materials now, that we won’t even know the impact of them until later on. So it’s late, and it takes a long time to see if there’s going to be any ill effects from it. If we don’t, if we get our controls, right, actually, no one should have any ill effects. That’s what we’re striving for on on this programme, is to eliminate occupational acquired ill health or at least mitigate it—so people don’t become ill by the job that they do.
Rhian Owen
Hello, I’m Rhian Owen, and welcome to the HS2 Learning Legacy podcast.
HS2 will leave a legacy of environmentally responsible travel, economic regeneration and technological innovation for generations to come.
In this episode, we are looking at two ways of addressing threats to health and wellbeing – how can experience and innovation in health and safety practices enhance and improve the industry? First, we’ll consider one common risk to construction workers. We’ll see how this was mitigated on one project and discover how the methods used can be shared more broadly.
And then we will turn our attention to how we can all work together to improve wellbeing on site. We’ll see how important it is that people are able to raise concerns. And we’ll learn how to foster an environment that allows everyone to speak up.
On most construction sites, there is a good understanding of safety risks. People will wear a hard hat to protect themselves from dropped tools. They’ll have a fluorescent vest, and vehicles will have reversing alarms, to prevent collisions. The edges of unfinished structures will have barriers, to prevent falls.
Steps like this address immediate safety hazards. But they don’t go far enough to protect workers’ health and wellbeing.
Bill Strachan 03:29
Lazy occupational health and safety is going for the last line of defence, which is generally the PPE side of things. And that’s where we see a lot of the, small to medium sized enterprise supply chain members that really don’t quite grasp that.
Rhian Owen
This is Bill Strachan. He’s the safety, health and wellbeing manager for EKFB on HS2. Along with Alison Crawley, head of occupational health for EKFB, and Tim Calow, safety, heatlh, and welfare adviser, he’s written a paper for the learning legacy programme, addressing longer term health risks. It’s called Control of hand and arm vibrations on HS2 and beyond.
Alison Crawley 04:16
HAVS, otherwise known as hand arm vibration syndrome, is a condition that can develop in people’s hands and arms through the prolonged and repeated use of vibrating tools.
Rhian Owen
It’s often known as vibration white finger and can have serious impacts on the quality of life.
Alison Crawley 04:34
It’s entirely preventable, but it is disabling. You can’t cure it once you’ve got it. So people will get symptoms like numbness and tingling in their fingers, they might lose their grip strength. And putting that in perspective, you look at if it’s really severe, you can’t do up buttons, you couldn’t do up your zip on your trousers so you wouldn’t be able to go to the toilet unaided. If you played golf, for example, you might not be able to grip the golf club. So it has an effect on all aspects of your life.
Rhian Owen
It can reduce people’s ability to look after themselves. It is painful and disabling. And it can stop someone from working.
Alison Crawley 05:13
Someone who has lower stages of hand arm vibration syndrome might be restricted from the use of tools, say by 50%; but more severely they’ll be restricted from using tools ever again.
Rhian Owen
The team became aware of a HAVS risk when they met a team of riggers who would be putting together a concrete batching plant. The plant was supplied by a subsidiary of EKFB member Eiffage. Plants like this are delivered in containers, and assembled on site. The rigging crew travel the world, assembling the plants.
Tim Calow 05:50
The people, the crew who were putting the batching plant together were mostly Spanish and had very, very little English.
We spent a period of about two months working with them. Some of the health and safety aspects of their work, we questioned. And putting together particularly the silos, great big sheets of metal, something in the region of two-and-a-half to five thousand bolts. They were using an, an impact wrench to tighten, and they were using a spanner to hold the nut of the bolt. And we were concerned about that.
Rhian Owen
If you’re looking to reduce HAVS risks, it seems obvious that the risk will be associated with vibrating tools. But that’s not what the team found.
Tim Calow 06:42
We brought in our occupational hygienist who measure things like hand arm vibration. And that showed us some fairly alarming results, particularly for the vibration that was coming from the spanner because it was it was vibrating from the impact wrench and almost being amplified into the spanner.
Rhian Owen
They needed to reduce the vibrations through the spanner. First, they looked for a better piece of equipment.
Bill Strachan 07:11
Manufacturers of vibrating tools will give you a factory output of what the vibration is in metres per second.
And there’s no way you would actually ever be able to pick up any vibration levels on a spann… common-or-garden spanner.
We did actually go out and look for a proprietary spanner that did have insulation on it. And then we came up with a blank.
Rhian Owen
The focus on the non-vibrating equipment was key but the solution was simple – applying further insulation material to the spanners. Doing this it reduced that vibration level down 95%. From that point onwards this solution was applied on all similar tools on the project and on other sites
Tim Calow 07:51
These guys spend their life round the world putting together batching plants, that’s what they do. So it was very useful for them. And they had very little understanding of the danger that they were putting themselves in through their normal work.
Rhian Owen
By working with the batching plant crew, the EKFB team had identified and eliminated a long-term risk to health. They demonstrated the importance of going beyond ‘lazy’ safety of just focusing on immediate risks. A long-term vision is needed to protect everyone’s health and wellbeing.
Alison Crawley 08:27
We talk about vibration, we talk about noise, and these are all health hazards that are common in the construction industry. But they’re not always seen as like first and foremost or as important as safety. So one of the things we want to do at EKFB was raised the profile of health hazards.
Traditionally, if you’re looking at health, in any industry, not just construction, you look at medicals, so safety critical medicals, have they had that done? You take, you might look at wellbeing, sort out the mental health aspects, but the things that actually can harm people now, but not have an effect until 10, 15 years time, are seen as less important, because it’s not here-and-now like an accident.
Rhian Owen
It’s the ‘somebody else’s problem’ problem. We’ll all feel a responsibility to, stop a colleague stepping off a scaffold for example. But we might not think of ourselves as having a duty to protect their long-term wellbeing.
Just as much as we don’t see those risks to others, we often don’t see long term risks to ourselves.
Tim Calow 09:30
You do see it on sites, you see, perhaps younger colleagues, thinking, “Oh, it’ll never happen to me”, because they’re in their 20s and 30s. This kind of impacts somebody in you know, in middle life, but they think, “Well, you know, it’s never gonna happen to me”. And of course, it’s like, perhaps attached to things like smoking, it could have an effect on you in later life. So it’s not like an injury where you hurt yourself immediately. It’s long term. And that’s why people don’t always quite get it.
Alison Crawley 10:05
You go to the other end of the spectrum to the older guys who perhaps lost some of their hearing already, because of years in different industries. And they think, “Why bother?”
Rhian Owen
The team wanted to make sure that everyone on site understood HAVS risks.
Alison Crawley 10:19
We actually made a video on hand on vibration, but we got people working on site to be the actors so there was no sort of trained actors, it was all people on site. And the idea of that was peer to peer message, so that people then understood and they spread the message and when people watched the video, they could identify with people in it.
Rhian Owen
There’s a link to the video in the paper, and in the show notes.
They also organised supply chain events to raise awareness of the impacts of HAVS.
Bill Strachan 10:50
And again, it’s an education. And that was one of the big things that came out in the HAVS forum that we had, because we did have actually quite good attendance from the smaller supply chain members as well.
Rhian Owen
Using resources like the videos, talks, and forums, helped everyone focus on the risks of HAVS.
One method to minimising HAVS risk is to measure how much exposure site workers are getting to vibration. This is scored on a scale. But it can be hard to track how much risk each individual faces. The EKFB team found a way to do this.
Bill Strachan 11:23
We engaged a company called React Tech.
One of the things that they have they have a device that you wear on your wrist similar to a watch. And it does many things but one of the things that you can do is measure vibration. So we invited them on to site and we did a lot of trials with them.
Rhian Owen
The device allows individual workers to track their exposure to vibration levels.These limits also act as a motivation to employers and managers to consider how the job is done. If it can’t be done within safe limits, then an alternative must be found. And it aids with training.
Bill Strachan 12:01
One of the other positives of the React tech system, is you may have half a dozen guys using the same tool. And then so it gives us a good idea that we can go “okay, let’s identify this guy. Is he holding the tool right? Is he using the tool right?” You know, it’s all about ergonomics, as well. So, it gives us a good indication that we can see that individuals may not be actually using the tool correctly.
Rhian Owen
The team were able to share HAVS risks and mitigations with the crew on site, and through the supply chain. They were able to track and act on individual exposure to risk. But how could they share the legacy of their work across industry?
Bill Strachan 12:38
As far as, you know, the HS2 project goes as a whole, I started the project almost four years ago, I can still remember going through my induction, and it was really, you know, the big thing is always about leaving a legacy, and bringing on the next generation of construction workers and making a safer place for them to operate.
Alison Crawley 13:00
The Learning Legacy papers are really good. I go to the Health Leadership Forum, which is all of the health leads from the joint ventures working for HS2 and we share all of the good practice there. Likewise, the occupational hygienists some forum and they share good practice too. One of the other things we’ve done at EKFB is go out to other industries and just see what are they doing? Certainly, car manufacturing, we’ve been up to visit them, how do they manage things, they’ve come to see us. And we’re just sharing that cross-industry knowledge.
Rhian Owen
The HAVS team’s work shows how workplaces can identify wellbeing risks, find solutions, and disseminate them. It was based, in part, on discussions among colleagues. But these discussions can only be successful when everyone feels respected and able to speak up. How do we foster that atmosphere of respect? How do we make sure that everyone can identify risks and harms? How can we ensure that the varied challenges that each individual faces, are seen by their colleagues?
That has been the subject of a paper by Chloe Chand of BBV, Safe at Heart: establishing an inclusive and safe culture for our employees. Chloe was Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Partner at BBV when she wrote the paper. She is now lead diversity and inclusion trainer at Diversifying Group.
Ben Hickman worked with Chloe on the programme at BBV. He is Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Partner at BBV. Mutual respect, fostered by the EDI programme he worked on with Chloe, is a key component of a safe workplace, he says.
Ben Hickman 14:43
We all have a responsibility when it comes to, you know, people’s health, safety, and well-being. And I think what’s really important is that ED&I almost bridges that gap between, you know, potential, lack of understanding or, or not having that awareness to, you know, bring to light, what adjustments people might need, in their working environments, that could be, for instance, you know, if they have certain disabilities, they might need ramp access, to get onto site or to get into a compound, for instance.
Rhian Owen
The need to accommodate physical disabilities is made clear in law in the UK. It’s a vital first step in any EDI programme.
Chloe Chand 15:28
If we’re thinking about the physical safety and physical health of someone in the workplace, then reasonable adjustments are something that should be provided for each individual based on their disabilities.
Ben Hickman 15:42
It’s that social, almost, model of disability where people are—or they feel that they are—disabled by systems and processes are not by them being for instance, if they have mobility, disabilities, where they need a wheelchair, for instance, it’s that argument where it’s actually the lack of, again, that example of an accessible ramp makes them disabled, not the fact that they’re there in that wheelchair.
Rhian Owen
Reasonable accommodation of physical disabilities is a legal requirement. The benefits are clear. But we differ from each other in ways that might not always be obvious. And these differences can have a real impact on how we spot and remedy potential risks and harms.
Ben Hickman 16:25
We’ve touched upon, you know, the, the physical elements, I think there’s also that argument around the mental especially when it comes to safety. So elements or, you know, there might be some buzzwords like psychological safety. So you know, where people can actually feel that they can safely speak up, to disagree without fear of negative repercussions. I think that’s absolutely vital. And inclusivity plays a key part of that.
Rhian Owen
The challenge for Chloe and Ben, and their colleagues at BBV, was to design a programme that fostered inclusivity, within a safe workspace. They established a set of four golden rules: be fit for work, always receive a briefing, take five before you start, and speak up.
Ben Hickman 17:10
Speaking up is absolutely a golden rule.
Rhian Owen
The best people to spot a risk are often those closest to it. They need to speak up when they encounter an issue. By creating an environment where colleagues feel they are heard and respected, workplaces can better identify health, safety and wellbeing risks.
Ben Hickman 17:29
Taking five. So you know, making sure that you’ve, if you need five minutes to gather yourself, or be ready for what you’ve got planned.
Rhian Owen
Taking a pause gives people time to make sure they understand how to perform tasks safely. It also helps them consider their own preparedness.
Ben Hickman 17:47
Be fit for work, you know, it’s really, really vital that people understand that they need to be ready for the working environment, but they also need to highlight to, you know, maybe their line manager, or someone in their workspace that actually they’re not feeling well, or they’re a bit tired, or, you know, it could be any reason, but it then allows the work to still be done, but in a safer way.
Rhian Owen
We each need to consider our own state of health for work. We need to feel comfortable raising any concerns.
Ben Hickman 18:20
Always receive a briefing. It’s absolutely vital that people understand the work that they have to do on a construction site, in a workforce. And as we’ve touched upon, it’s about how do we make sure that everyone has had that briefing, and they understand fully to the best of their ability, what is actually required of them today, again, to make sure that they, you know, finish the work safely, and to obviously go home safely.
Rhian Owen
You can’t ensure you are prepared for a task, or raise safety concerns, unless you fully understand the task. Receiving a clear briefing is essential. And employers and managers need to ensure that those receiving the briefing understand it.
The golden rules establish what we need to do to ensure a safe working environment. They are clear and straightforward. But to implement them well, we need to understand why people may sometimes find them a challenge.
Let’s look at one of the rules, ‘Always receive a briefing’. Why might that not be simple to follow?
Ben Hickman 19:23
We have over 70 different nationalities as part of the BBV HS2 project. Does everyone who’s receiving that briefing know the full extent of what’s been told to them. You know, do they have questions? Do they feel that they can ask those questions, you know, because again, sort of pulling it back to the physical that could lead to potential harm or danger for people because they haven’t, perhaps fully understood.
Rhian Owen
The right approach considers everyone’s ability to follow the briefing, and ensures that they each have understood it.
Ben Hickman 19:58
That’s where we have an opportunity, or EDI does, to come in and think of that different perspective, or perhaps providing that diversity of thought to think, have we thought about how people who might not understand what you’re explaining to them? Maybe it’s a neurodiverse condition like dyslexia. So if you’re giving them, you know, that written instructions, have they understood that to its, you know, to its fullest?
Or if it is, like I said, the language barrier, might we introduce more pictorial documents where they can understand from, you know, pictures instead, or having, you know, a language buddy, for instance.
Rhian Owen
It’s hard to speak up if you don’t feel included and welcomed in your workspace. Sometimes, we can make colleagues feel disrespected and unwelcome, even without meaning to. It’s something Chloe has experienced.
Chloe Chand 20:49
I get all the time like, “Well, what’s your real name?” My real name is Chloe. But because I’m brown, there’s just this idea that that doesn’t fit what it should be. So that in itself is what we would call a microaggression. It’s meant to seem like a compliment, or it’s meant to seem like it’s harmless, but actually can cause offence, because then that’s, in a way questioning someone’s identity.
Rhian Owen
Asking someone to justify their name, or to comment on their appearance—might be intended as a compliment, or an expression of interest in learning about them, or harmless flirtation or banter. But it won’t always be heard like that.
Chloe Chand 21:23
Understanding each other, that is the bottom line to it. But microaggressions come from our biases, don’t they? They’re biases that we’re not aware of, we don’t understand that we have them. And because we’re not aware, they come out through our words and our actions, and we don’t realise that we’re doing it. So a big part of it comes from understanding how our unconscious biases can impact the other person or can impact our actions towards someone because what we don’t recognise is these are preconceived ideas that we have in our mind of what a person should be, or how a person should act.
Rhian Owen
We can feel discomfort when people point out how our words and actions impact them. Some people will feel like their own thoughts and identity are being policed. We all want to be respected. Most of us can see that respect is a two-way relationship. But building a respectful environment can take time.
Ben Hickman 22:16
People have this notion that EDI is about almost policing people’s behaviour, when actually, it is about change. And obviously, we know that people don’t often see change as a good thing. But it’s about bringing people to the table. And I think having that nudging approach, instead of just, we’re gonna give you one large message for six months, and then never talk about it.
Rhian Owen
Change can be driven from the top, and from the bottom. In many organisations, leadership positions are disproportionately held by people who share characteristics: often, they are straight, white, older men. They may never have had a moment to consider how their employees differ from them. Chloe and the team at BBV took an established approach to this problem, and built upon it.
Chloe Chand 23:05
The reverse mentoring programme was kicked off to establish a better understanding of each other. So if we think about leadership versus like the junior colleagues and what that what that looks like in effect, so it’s not just in construction, it’s in other organisations that I’ve been involved in, you have a very specific type of person who is in leadership and can get into leadership. And then if you compare that to the workforce, is that reflected? Can people see themselves in what is leading the company, what is leading the organisation? So reverse mentoring is a way to help leadership to gain that empathetic understanding of their workforce. So, some places do it where it’s specific to what they feel as though they need to focus on—so some do it just based on ethnicity or just based on gender. At BBV, we decided to base it on all different types of marginalisation. So we looked at ethnicity, we looked at disability, whether that was neurodiverse, or whether that was physical. We also looked at gender, sexuality.
Rhian Owen
Many staff members, and those in leadership, will have a lot of experience to share. We shape workplace hierarchies around this mentoring. But it’s important that others’ experiences are also shared.
Chloe Chand 24:32
The idea of it is that you pair a junior colleague with someone from the leadership team. So we had all of our executive team involved in the reverse mentoring programme. And they basically mentor the leadership team. So it’s reverse because you would expect it to be a more experienced mentor support and a mentee. But in this case, the experience is not based on your career, it’s based on your identity and your own personal experiences.
Rhian Owen
BBV’s leadership and staff took to the programme with enthusiasm. They committed to the time and effort it needed.
Chloe Chand 25:10
I think there must have been 17 pairings at one point. So, it was a, it was a big rollout that we did that involve lots of training not just for the mentors, but for the mentees too, because it is really easy when you are leadership to want to take kind of the ownership of it. But that’s not the point of it, the point of it is that you are being mentored, so you need to allow that to happen for you. So, it was very powerful, we had such positive feedback from the reverse mentoring programme.
Rhian Owen
Reverse mentoring helps leaders understand their colleagues’ experiences. It allows reverse mentors to see a potential place for themselves in leadership. But change must take place across an organisation. Ben and Chloe developed a programme that embeds mutual respect, including the roll-out of EDI toolbox talks through a network of EDI champions.
Ben Hickman 26:05
We’ve had more and more people attending those toolbox talks across the whole project. It’s not just one could argue, oh, that’s just going to happen in your office spaces. But actually, we’re really proactive and making sure that people out on site also get those messages.
Rhian Owen
Experience is inherently individual. We can only see the world through our own eyes, and our understanding is shaped by our identity. EDI programmes help us gain insight into others’ experience.
Organisations are as diverse as individuals, and a learning legacy programme can help organisations learn from each other in a similar way
Ben Hickman 26:46
The whole concept of Learning Legacy is understanding what legacy you want to have or be known as, but also the whole point about learning is it’s continuous. We’re always learning, and I think people also need to recognise society changes, so do workplaces.
Rhian Owen
The road to mutual respect can be a long one. Driving change that helps us raise and fix safety or wellbeing risks is a continuous process. But the learning legacy papers we’ve looked at today will equip organisations with the tools they need to do this.
Credits
Rhian Owen
I’ve been your host Rhian Owen. Thanks to our guests Fiona King, Bill Strachan, Alison Crawley, Tim Calow, Chloe Chand, and Ben Hickman
You can get more detail on all the topics featured in this series by taking a look the HS2 Learning Legacy website, we have provided links in the episode description.
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