Safety and Wellbeing
Objective
Enhance positive wellbeing
Goals
Achieve Zero Harm
Protect health and promote healthy lifestyles
Create a culture that enables positive mental, physical, social and financial wellbeing
“Our people are our most important asset and, because of this, we go to great lengths to ensure a very hands-on approach to learning. The space we created at The Park brings alive the awareness of the occupational hazards that our people will encounter while working on our sites.”
Andy Shuttlewood, Tarmac’s Health, Safety, Environment & Quality Director
Our vision is to provide a workplace where employees and contractors are not harmed. Where everyone recognises that all incidents are preventable, and health must never be compromised. Ensuring this will enable us to achieve our ‘Work Safe Home Safe’ commitment.
At Tarmac we want to enhance positive wellbeing across our business. Protecting the health, safety and wellbeing of our employees, contractors and those around us is of paramount importance for Tarmac and the impetus behind our drive to develop a zero harm culture.
Highlights
Safety
We aim to achieve zero harm across our business and monitor and report on the safety performance of all our operations and include our employees, contractors and independent contract hauliers in our safety performance data. Across our business operations in 2021 we had a Total Recordable Case Frequency Rate (TRCFR) of 1.97 incidents for every million hours worked and a Lost Time Injury Frequency Rate (LTIFR) of 0.96. Any incident is one too many and we remain committed to driving continuous health and safety improvements across our business to reduce incident rates and achieve our commitment to zero harm.
In May, we opened our new occupational health and wellbeing facility at our National Skills and Safety Park. The park provides colleagues with practical, hands-on training for emerging industry talent and was created to support our commitment to investing in our people. From demonstrations of the effects of unsafe working practices to explanations about how dust masks can protect colleagues in later years, the new facility has been creatively and thoughtfully designed to take employees through an interactive occupational health journey.
Keeping our employees safe through COVID-19
Throughout the pandemic, as well as following public health guidelines, Tarmac has operated to its own COVID-19 Roadmap, which sets out how we will apply public health guidelines within our business, providing consistency to our employees and contractors. To keep our employees as safe as possible we put protocols in place, such as wearing masks at our sites, social distancing, temperature testing on site and continued hybrid working. Tarmac’s COVID-19 protocols have worked well to protect our colleagues during the pandemic. We continue to tread cautiously and review our next steps regularly.
Health and Safety Roadmap – 2021
Our strategy for improving health and safety and achieving our commitment to Work Safe Home Safe is outlined in our 2021 Health and Safety Roadmap and focuses on four strategic pillars:
1. Leadership and culture
Setting the standards, leading by example, training and developing knowledge and competence of frontline supervisors.
2. Management systems
Continuing to embed our health and safety management systems and controls across the business.
3. Communication
Maintaining a robust health and safety communications framework. Encouraging shared learning and preventive action following an incident.
4. Assurance and governance
Establishing risk / opportunities registers. Focusing on root cause and streamlining management review and reporting tools.
Effective safety management
We successfully implemented the International Occupational Health and Safety Management standard, ISO 45001 in 2021 and continue to operate to this standard across the business. To achieve this certification, independent audits were undertaken at over 50 sites across the business, in addition to the many audits conducted by our own in-house safety experts and our Quality and Assurance team. This management system is a cornerstone of our efforts to further reduce workplace incidents.
Health
As the COVID-19 pandemic continued throughout 2021 we were still faced with challenges, not only to our physical health but also our mental health. To raise awareness of the importance of mental wellbeing and ensure we support our colleagues across Tarmac, we have trained 77 Mental Health First Aiders, with 816 employees completing ‘Manage the Conversation’ training and over 1,500 completing ‘Start the Conversation’ training. More colleagues have committed to undertaking this training in 2022.
Over
In 2021, we were also able to restart face-to-face medicals for our employees, which had to be postponed in 2020 due to the risks posed by COVID-19. In total, 1,633 employees completed a medical in 2021. We have a robust plan in place to ensure all employees have had medicals according to their occupational requirements by the end of 2022.
Enhancing positive wellbeing
Wellbeing is the feeling of being happy, healthy and comfortable. This can mean different things to different people, but it usually involves four main elements: mental, physical, social and financial. It is important for us to promote and support each element of wellbeing to enable our employees to thrive.
We have added a wellbeing section to our employee intranet, the Circle, where employees can access a range of wellbeing material from mental health first aiders, webinars and the latest wellbeing news. We also have a wellbeing centre through our employee rewards website providing education, support and the tools to live a healthier and happier life.
Mental wellbeing
Tarmac launched a Mental Health and Wellbeing Community on the Circle, which is a place for employees to share advice and knowledge, provide support on mental health and wellbeing, or just socialise together. We also took part in a range of mental health awareness days, such as Mental Health Awareness Week and World Mental Health Day and encouraged our employees to take five and spend more time in nature to boost positive mental health and wellbeing.
Physical wellbeing
As part of our wellbeing centre we introduced a section dedicated to getting moving. Here, employees have access to free home workouts and featured articles on physical wellbeing. Our Transport Manager at Tunstead also started virtually teaching ‘desk yoga’ every Wednesday to help colleagues relieve tension, calm the mind and connect with others.
In February 2021 colleagues took part in our Mile-a-Day Challenge. The aim of this challenge was to help everyone invest in their wellbeing throughout February, and form good habits that would carry on through the year. We also used the month to raise money for the Weir Archer Academy – and we achieved both aims!
Financial wellbeing
We enhanced our financial wellbeing by offering new resources, such as savings tools and educational materials, in partnership with two new providers, Cushon and Salary Finance, via our internal Tarmac Rewards website. Financial wellness can help to lower stress levels and improve overall wellbeing both at home and in the workplace and it is important to us that we provide support and guidance regarding financial resilience. Through our wellbeing centre, employees have access to a range of materials to help with their financial wellbeing including articles and money tools such as a budget planner.
We also ran a range of wellbeing webinars during 2021, including a financial wellbeing webinar which provided employees with educational materials and access to financial products such as loans, ISAs and savings products through a new partnership with Salary Finance.
Social wellbeing
With the challenges of COVID-19, and the impact of social wellbeing due to working from home and self- isolation, Tarmac wanted employees to still feel connected to each other when working from home. To address this, we launched our Tarmac Communities platform on the Circle, to help colleagues find like-minded people to share advice and knowledge, provide support or just socialise together. We ran a webinar for Tarmac employees to explain why social wellness is important.
Looking forward:
Safety remains a key priority for our business, and we will continue to drive towards our goal of zero harm, our transition to focus on wellbeing and to embed a culture that enhances positive wellbeing. Tarmac is preparing to deliver more mental health first aider training and plans for all employees to have completed their scheduled medicals by the end of 2022. We aim to develop the next phase of our wellbeing strategy in 2022 and will continue to build on existing tools and resources for colleagues through webinars, our wellbeing centre and employee communities. A new online safety and environment system, Intelex, will also be launched to bring consistency to the way we work through one central safety data reporting tool.