How Laing O’Rourke is taking Safety to the NextGear – a discussion with Zenergy
With many Australia companies pushing traditional health safety methodology beyond its capability – I sat down with Tim Fleming where he explained how Laing O’Rourke developed ‘NextGear’ to comprehensively empower workers and deliver safer environments.
Having seen the evolution of safety strategies over the past 10 years, I have been fortunate to speak to many thought leaders that have been restless in their approach to continual improvement. No one will deny that work, health and safety is a work in progress but thanks to the efforts of many of its practitioners, it is constantly evolving.
One such example is the leadership team at Laing O’Rourke and General Manager HSE Tim Fleming. They set about finding ways to not only add value but to also deliver better working environments that empower building and construction employees.
“We weren’t satisfied that the traditional zero harm focus was offering our organisation everything we needed for the future and we were restless about what more we could do,” Tim pointed out.
“At Laing O’Rourke we are committed to challenging and changing the way the construction industry goes to work everyday.”
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So how has Laing O’Rourke’s Next Gear initiative approached this massive undertaking?
Defining success
One of the major issues with the traditional paradigm is the reactionary approach to work, health and safety that relies on metrics and numbers to define success. Simply applying penalties and audits after an accident or due to failure is not a sustainable approach.
So how has Laing O’Rourke’s Next Gear initiative approached this massive undertaking?
Beginning with the idea that zero harm, while it had served a major purpose at Laing O’Rourke in improving safety performance, it no longer offered our organisation a sustainable work, health and safety strategy, the leadership team picked up the idea of adding value to the organisation through a comprehensive rewrite of company policy.
“We understood we could no longer continue to describe our safety performance in terms of numbers and only measure what went wrong – and the idea that achieving a zero statistic meant that we had a safe workplace.
We wanted to change the perception, and in some cases, the reality of safety away from paperwork bureaucracy, and blame,” said Mr Fleming.
In response, Next Gear was developed to disrupt the traditional delivery of safety while contributing to the overall success of an organisatio
n.
To achieve success, the team at Laing O’Rourke outlined that while the end result was important, it is the journey that really counts. This means developing an organisational culture that is one part resilience and another part empowerment.
“We see success as building resilience in the company by understanding the conditions that create a culture of engagement and trust – not just a system of compliance and control.”
Next Gear offers an alternative approach that engages people and looks to individuals to effect success.
” What we want to achieve is an environment where we no longer seek blame but look at the individual as someone who will provide the solution.”
To achieve this, Mr Fleming and others within the leadership team have developed mechanisms, forums and processes that ask and encourage workers to contribute to the overall safety of an organisation.
Managing relationships
One of the major challenges that Tim and the management team of Laing O’Rourke faced was how to bring external stakeholders, suppliers and partners on the same journey.
“Working and engaging with these key stakeholders including our clients and our key supply chain partners has been absolutely critical to our approach of approaching safety differently.
“We’re now in a position where some clients are calling us in to ask us how they might deliver a step-change approach in their own fields. We don’t have all the answers, but we’re happy to play our part for the industry.”
For those at Laing O’Rourke, and Tim Fleming especially, redefining what success looks like has driven safety to the Next Gear. From empowering workers to creating a culture of resilience, the journey towards success has been as fruitful as the end result will be.
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