Our strong health, safety and wellbeing culture
The potential hazards faced by our industry require the highest standards of health and safety.
The Wessex Water Executive Leadership Team support and empower every colleague to make the right decision to ensure the protection and safety of anyone involved in, or might be affected by, our operations and activities.
We continue to develop and embed a strong health, safety and wellbeing culture in our day-to-day operations and every employee is empowered to stop work on the grounds of health and safety.
No activity can be totally without risk and we must ensure that our operations are carried out in such a way to remove unnecessary risk, and control and manage any residual risk to prevent injury or harm.
Employee engagement
Protecting the health, safety and wellbeing of our colleagues, contractors and customers continues to be an established and shared responsibility that is essential to our reputation as a leading, trusted employer and service provider.
Colleagues are encouraged to report all incidents, accidents and to share their safety observations to support proactive intervention to prevent accidents from ever happening.
Any report that raises significant concern is subject to additional investigation and a “make it right” review which can lead to changes in procedures, new training and/or equipment to improve the safe system of working applied.
We practise a just culture, using incidents as opportunities to learn and evolve.
We actively involve our frontline people in decisions which influence the direction of our health and safety strategy – this positive employee engagement helps us to develop practical policies and procedures.
Safety initiatives
We will not allow ourselves to become complacent. In addition to reviewing existing policies and procedures to ensure they remain relevant, we also carry out other initiatives, including but not limited to:
- implementing a new health and safety management and reporting system to support incident and observation reporting as well as compliance and performance monitoring
- introducing a new arrangement for managing the safety of lone and mobile workers
- running a dedicated wellbeing group to enable our colleagues achieve good mental health through a series of monthly health and wellbeing campaigns
- training around 120 mental health first aiders.
Monitoring accidents and incidents
We monitor all accidents and incidents reported by colleagues and we pay attention to:
- the annual number of total and reportable incidents
- the annual number of lost time incidents
- category and classification trends
- the root causes
- the remedial actions – number raised and compliance performance.
We also focus on performance indicators to support safety evolution through analysis of:
- lagging indicators – information obtained from post incident findings
- leading indicators, information obtained proactively, where an accident has not needed to happen from which to learn.
Collectively this information is use to support future strategies and ensure the attention and action is focused appropriately and efficiently.
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