Creating an Incident and Injury-Free™ (IIF™) safety culture on the Heathrow T5 construction project
How BAA made safety a fundamental value and set the benchmark for the UK construction industry
75%
said T5 site was safest they had experienced
Challenge
Construction on London Heathrow’s £4.2Bn Terminal 5 (T5) passenger terminal began in 2002. The company responsible for the project, British Airports Authority (BAA) had never undertaken a project of this scale before and recognized the potential health and safety risks associated with such a large and complex undertaking. Based on industry norms it was predictable that during its lifecycle the project would suffer two fatalities and over 600 serious injuries. For BAA that was unacceptable. They had implemented a comprehensive safety management system but knew this alone would not produce the required safety results. To capture the hearts and minds of the large and highly diverse workforce they needed to create a strong safety culture. JMJ was engaged to support the project management team in developing a different approach to safety by implementing IIF across the entire site.
Solution
Leaders knew that successful culture transformation couldn’t be created from the top down, it would be achieved by making everyone take responsibility for their own safety, and that of their co-workers. To create an aligned safety culture across all levels of the project:
- All directors from T5 and its suppliers were introduced to IIF, creating a totally integrated approach
- 300 line managers attended a two-day IIF commitment session
- 450 supervisors participated in IIF briefings
- The commitment to safety was authentic, visible, and actively reinforced across the site all day, every day
- In its tier-one contracts, BAA stipulated its expectations on how tier twos should be engaged to ensure that its approach was carried throughout the project supply chain
Client Goals
- Create a vision for the future of safety, and develop the leadership required to achieve that vision
- Elevate individuals’ awareness of safety by making it personal, relevant and important to every single person on the project
- Make safety a core value, not just one of a competing list or priorities
- Put the ‘human factor’ at the very heart of the project’s safety
We’ve always had four competing factors in the construction industry: safety, time, cost and quality… We realised that we had to take safety out of that equation altogether – to make it a fundamental value.
The case for change here was so compelling. We knew we couldn’t hide behind percentages. This is about saving people’s lives.
Results
T5 was delivered on time and within its planned budget. From the very early stages of IIF, the project saw impressive results. Workers were able to talk openly with their supervisors about safety issues and felt empowered to stop unsafe work in their own area. The success of the approach led to its adoption by key suppliers and on other projects. In addition, project management received positive feedback from the HSE, unions and insurers.
Key takeaways
- By committing to a safety approach in the early stages, it is possible to buck industry trends even on a complex, large scale infrastructure project
- Creating a people-centric safety culture requires an authentic commitment from leadership at all levels
- There is no ‘acceptable’ level of injuries or fatalities.
- Incident and Injury-Free is about everybody going home safely, every day
- Safety cannot be treated only as a metric to be measured, it must become a core value for everybody involved in the project
Incident reduction
40% decrease in the number of minor incidents
Zero reportable accidents
Two periods of 1 million worker hours without reportable accident
An authentic safety culture
75% of the workforce said the site was the safest they had experienced
Benchmark project
T5 set a new benchmark for construction industry safety projects