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37 days ago

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In Sodexo we know we are surrounded by safety leaders – those who care deeply about the health, safety and wellbeing of our colleagues, clients and consumers. At a time when safety is of the utmost importance to help stop the spread of Coronavirus (Covid-19), the annual Have a Safe Day Awards give us an opportunity to recognise those leading in safety and celebrate the Hidden Heroes improving our safety culture.

Now in their fourth year, the awards are your opportunity to nominate teams or individuals who continue to demonstrate good safety practices, support the creation of innovative safety content and can evidence a prolonged or improved safety performance on their site or contract. In total the UK and Ireland made more than 30 nominations this year – thank you to everyone who took the time to make a submission.

Our regional Have a Safe Day Award finalists were announced on last week’s Virtual Town Hall, with two individuals and one team now in with a chance of winning one of four global awards. Read about each finalist below and discover more about why they are Sodexo’s safety stars.

Laura Pike - Cleaning manager, Bhurtpore Barracks – Government & Agencies

With an absolute passion for health and safety, Laura continues to demonstrate how to successfully work with a client to improve safety performance onsite.

Laura has been selected by her client, Aspire, as a sign of her dedication to safety to become a member of their ‘Safe and Sure Action Group’ which promotes proactive health and safety behaviours by working directly with the client and stakeholders. Laura has worked with them on a number of initiatives including a safety calendar which raised over £3,000 for charity.

She has also been instrumental in organising a health and safety completion and awareness day held at the garrison which brought an innovative and successful approach to health and safety training for Sodexo’s customer facing teams. Laura was also fundamental in launching the ‘Pass it On' card on site – a scheme that promotes safety by asking colleagues to name two things that they will do today to ensure the safety of others, passing the card forward to someone else once you have completed the two tasks.

As the contract's Health and Safety Champion, Laura’s dedication and work has seen her team of 30 have no Lost Time Incidents (LTI) in the past year; a true indication of her commitment to ensuring the safety of others.

Ian Hendry – Technical Operations manager, Northumbria University – Schools & Universities

Ian lives and breathes health and safety with an enthusiasm demonstrated by fantastic results within the Northumbria University contract, that with his help is now over two and a half years accident and injury free.

Ian is always supportive and has been instrumental in helping another contract to learn from his good practices, as well as working closely with the client’s health and safety team to bring improvements across the campus.

As a constant motivator, Ian reminds the team about good health and safety practices and has been the leader behind most of the innovations that have been made on site. These include the positive safety conversation notebook – an initiative that not only encourages people to have good safety conversations, but asks them to challenge unsafe behaviour. As a site that is regularly audited by the local fire service, Ian elevated statutory requirements by introducing a student fire safety campaign working to create a fire awareness video and posting it on the relevant student social media channels. The result of this campaign saw students’ behaviours change, and the number of fire-related near miss reports reduce.

With a file full of qualifications and training course certificates, Ian is also keen to make sure he is always up to speed with innovative ways to keep everyone on campus safe.

Melissa Jordan and the Diageo contract team – Corporate Services

The Diageo contract team is nominated for the development and creation of a near miss and hazard spotting interactive toolkit which has resulted in improving safety behaviours across multiple sites. The contract team is made up of:

• Melissa Jordan – Customer Experience manager
• Dale Rowe – AV Technician at Diageo 7HQ
• Tracy Sykes – Quality, Safety & Environment manager at AstraZeneca (prev. Diageo)
• Joanna Watt – Communications manager

Melissa had the original idea to produce videos that recreate a first-person journey through sites, showing various hazards and near misses deliberately set up in a controlled way. The idea was that these videos would be shown, and the audience would try to write down as many safety hazards they could spot whilst the videos were playing - in essence, undertaking a virtual safety walk under real-time pressures.

Through this fresh way of enhancing and driving safety engagement, the first-person video perspective creates a real connection for the viewer by showing authentic risks for real people.

Each individual on the team played their part in delivering the toolkit that is now being shared across the Corporate Services estate in a bid to replicate the same impact at other sites and contracts.

Since the toolkit has been in use on the Diageo contract, the teams have seen a 75% reduction in LTI. The contract has also seen near miss submissions increase by almost 75% from 3,582 to 6,276.

Congratulations to all the finalists and well done for demonstrating Sodexo’s safety culture – you are all safety stars! Unfortunately, due to current safety restrictions, this year’s final has been postponed. It is usually held in Paris and hosted by Sodexo CEO Denis Machuel.

However, over the next three weeks we will be shining a spotlight on each finalist in a Q&A, sharing why safety is important to them, what they have done to support their team's safety performance and how you can adopt their good practices to improve your own.

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