Understanding safety behaviours

We explore how world-leading renewable energy group RES staged a global company-wide stand-down day to understand and improve safety behaviours.

The renewable energy sector is an exciting place to be. But its rapid growth, the sheer breadth of its operations and its need for expertise in a wide range of areas mean that keeping health and safety in full focus is a constant challenge. To tackle these issues, RES (Renewable Energy Systems) held a face‑to-face global company stand-down in 2022 with the aim of understanding and changing safety behaviours through psychology.

The company feels the effects of safety challenges acutely. As the world’s largest independent renewable energy company, it has been at the forefront of the industry for over 40 years, delivering more than 23 gigawatts (GW) of projects and supporting an operational asset portfolio exceeding 10GW across onshore and offshore wind, solar and energy storage, transmission and distribution. It is active in 11 countries, which makes creating a unified, company-wide safety culture difficult.

But the greater challenge, RES group HSQE director Dr Michael Sinclair-Williams (pictured, right) says, is that its operations are active across such a wide range of areas and disciplines. ‘In renewables, we bring together quite a large collection of different people from different industries. In each of these areas, there is a very different safety culture,’ he says.

‘Just to compound matters, the different renewable sectors themselves – wind, solar, battery storage and green hydrogen – are very different and are all experiencing significant technological change. So we are working in quite a complex environment with microcosms of lots of different safety cultures.’

Objectives

The stated objectives for RES’s 2022 Safety Focus Event were for people to:

• Identify their own appetite for risk and the consequences of their behaviours

• Recognise the hazards that can lead to dangerous situations

• Think before putting themselves and others at risk and feel confident to support each other to make the right choices.

For the safety culture survey and the two events, RES worked closely with the GB HSE’s Health and Safety Laboratory in Buxton, UK, and especially with its human factors technical lead Phoebe Smith. Phoebe and Eric Michrowski, a US-based psychologist from Propulo Consulting, a safety culture advisory and training firm, designed sessions for RES’s 2022 event. The aim was that, through psychology, RES would be able to understand and change behaviour crucial to improving safety performance in the workplace.

‘We recognise that it’s part of human nature for people to feel the urge to take risks, even though employees know RES is completely committed to making sure everybody goes home safely.

‘We identified that RES staff do everything with passion, but that means they might work extra hours or do something that exposes them to risks that we wouldn’t want them to take,’ Michael says.

‘We concluded that what we really wanted with the Safety Focus Event in 2022 was to create a nice smooth handover in terms of safety from the developers and the commercial teams to the construction teams, and then onwards to asset management and operations and maintenance teams. And the only way we could achieve that is to get under the skin of why people take risks.’

EXECUTION

The second RES Safety Focus Event was held in May 2022, with staff meeting physically at their own in-country events across 60 global locations. ‘We staggered events to fit in with local time zones, but they were synchronised in a lot of ways. We had a steering committee which was chaired by our chairman but, importantly, we asked the operating business rather than the HSQE leaders to run the events in their respective countries,’ Michael says.

‘The day was generally broken up into two parts. The first part was very much led by the group agenda, while the second was led by country-specific issues. For example, in Australia, mental health and wellbeing were really important. In Turkey, dealing with earthquakes was equally critical. This ability for country teams to focus on their own interests in the afternoon helped to make it more real for them. The other thing we did was set the leadership tone. Our chairman and our group CEO, plus the CEOs of our three business units, opened and closed the sessions in every country.’

The Safety Focus Event’s activities were designed to be interactive, offering people the opportunity to talk openly with one another. A key part of the day was a session during which participants were asked to bring a photograph to represent who or what they want to keep themselves safe for.

In the UK and Ireland region, organisers invited Gary Gallagher, a UK health and safety motivational speaker, to share his story of falling from height. They also issued a series of tips about keeping safe based on RES’s organisational message on safety: ‘Don’t Risk It.’ These tips described the positive behaviours expected of RES employees on-site to prevent accidents and near misses.

‘The other concept of the stand-down day was to get people who didn’t normally have site experience out to site. In Scandinavia, for example, our developers and our finance people in Stockholm had never been out to a site, so we took them,’ Michael says.

‘We copied that elsewhere. It summed up the notion that we are one company, and we should have one safety philosophy.’

RESULTS

A feedback survey after the 2022 Safety Focus Event found that most participants said they now felt confident or very confident to act on their concerns about safety. Many comments also showed that participants were able to identify the consequences of their behaviours and think before putting themselves and others at risk.

Such has been the success of the Safety Focus Events, the psychological basis behind them is now being used every day – with leaders using open questions at team meetings and using behaviour change techniques to keep safety front and centre.

‘In terms of future Safety Focus Events, the global events will probably be every two years, with a smaller event in between. We will be supporting each country to do its own event in 2023, albeit on a smaller scale, then in 2024 we are going to do another global event. To me, it’s very difficult trying to capture raw facts from events like this,’ Michael says. ‘However, our safety performance in terms of lost time started in 2018 with a lost time accident frequency rate of around 0.27, and we’ve just closed our year-end at 0.05 accidents per 100,000 hours worked. We’ve seen a year-on-year reduction of 81% over four years. So I think the metrics are all going in the right direction.

‘We’re changing our KPI this year to adopt total recordable incidents rates instead, which is a more granular level. And we’re looking forward to finding ways to continue to make improvements on our performance year-on-year.’

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