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A customer’s perspective on safety

5/10/2017 12:27 PM CET
Article

In this podcast, Karl Simons, the Head of Health, Safety, Security and Well-being at Thames Water, which provides 15 million customers in the UK with water and wastewater services, shares his perspectives on safety, health and well-being with Dylan Roberts, the Director of Health and Safety for Skanska in the UK.

Thames Water and Skanska are part of the eight2O alliance, a collaborative partnership that is delivering GBP 1.75BN of capital investments in water infrastructure between 2015 and 2020.

Hosting this 10-minute session is Neil Moore, Skanska AB Senior Vice President of Safety.

Highlights of Karl’s remarks include:

  • Trust and collaboration led by the customer set the tone for achieving a culture of safety.
  • Integration of design, construction and operations personnel early in the project is important to set the project up to deliver on intended results.
  • Major capital programs in the UK have typically seen a spike of worker injuries in the first year. “You have a melting pot of cultures coming together,” Karl says. Such an increase did not occur with the eight2O alliance. “We have done something remarkably different as a result of that trust and collaborative spirit that we set in place where everybody is an equal partner and aligned when it comes to health and safety.”
  • Projects with traditional construction contracts can achieve outcomes similar to alliance agreements.

Safety Week 2017

May 8 to 14, our 41,000 employees at thousands of projects in our home markets, along with more than 200,000 subcontractors, suppliers and business partners were involved in activities focused on workplace safety, health and well-being.