Safety and Wellbeing
Objective
Enhance positive wellbeing
Goals
Achieve Zero Harm
Protect health and promote healthy lifestyles
Create a culture that enables positive mental, physical, social and financial wellbeing
“It’s great to see how the ‘Step In’ campaign is continuing to empower colleagues to speak up if they see something that’s not safe. It’s becoming part of the culture on sites and hopefully stops incidents occurring in the first place, which make our sites a safer place to work.”
Iain Smith, regional health, safety and environmental manager – North and Scotland
At Tarmac, we want to enhance positive wellbeing across our business. We are committed to building a zero-harm culture that prioritises people’s health, safety and wellbeing, and targets continuous improvement. Protecting the health, safety and wellbeing of our employees, contractors and those around us is of paramount importance for Tarmac.
Highlights
Safety
We work hard to operate a safe and healthy business for all our employees and contractors. We monitor and report on the safety performance of all our operations and aim for continuous improvement and include both employees and contractors in our safety performance data.
Across our business operations in 2022, we had a Total Recordable Case Frequency Rate (TRCFR) of 1.5 incidents for every million hours worked and a Lost Time Injury Frequency Rate (LTIFR) of 0.59 for every million hours. Compared to 2021, this is around a 27% reduction in TRCFR and almost 47% in LTIFR. However, any incident is one too many and we remain committed to driving continuous health and safety improvements across our business to reduce incident rates and achieve our commitment to zero-harm.
Tarmac has been awarded a RoSPA Gold Health and Safety Award for the fifth year running demonstrating our high health and safety standards in 2022. This reflects our ongoing commitment to working hard to ensure employees and contractors get home safely to their families at the end of every working day.
In 2022, we launched our new Safety Plan across our operations, outlining how we protect ourselves and others, keeping everyone protected through safety standards, competence, training and our life-saving rules. To achieve this, the plan focuses on four main areas:
- Leading for safety
- Learning for safety
- Planning for safety
- Behaving for safety
This safety plan will ensure we meet our Tarmac commitment of ‘work safe, home safe’ - for everyone to arrive home as they came to work, fit and healthy.
Step In
Safety will always be a key priority at Tarmac, and we’re constantly striving to improve our safety record. That’s why we launched our ‘Step In’ campaign in 2022. It gives everyone across the business the confidence to speak up when something doesn’t look right. Through Step In, we want to create a safe place to enable our employees to challenge anything they think may be unsafe and start a conversation whenever they see this happening. We also want to use Step In to encourage employees speak up about positive examples of safety happening on site.
National Skills and Safety Park
Tarmac’s National Skills and Safety Park, which opened in 2020, provides operational onboarding, professional operational training, assessments and health and safety learning. This industry-leading facility demonstrates our ongoing commitment to a culture of safety excellence.
In 2022, Tarmac’s National Skills and Safety Park successfully completed its first Ofsted inspection, passing all three assessment areas. The same year, the park saw over 4,500 visitors and over 2,200 employees trained. This is more than double the number from 2021, as Covid-19 restrictions eased and more people were able to come and use the facilities.
Over 4,500 visitors to our National Skills and Safety Park
Over 2,200 employees trained at our National Skills and Safety Park
Health and wellbeing
We want to create a working environment where our employees can talk openly about mental health and get support when they need it. From training through our Mates in Mind partnership we now have 78 mental health first aiders across the business. The first aiders act as mental wellbeing champions and provide an essential line of additional support to their colleagues. In addition, 795 employees completed ‘manage the conversation’ training.
We continued getting our face-to-face medicals back on track for our employees, which had been disrupted due to Covid-19. We carry out routine medicals to ensure our operational employees are fit and healthy to do their roles if they are involved in "safety critical" tasks, and to check that these employees are not developing any of the occupational health issues that our health and safety measures are designed to control. By the end of 2022, routine medicals had been completed for around 90% of operational employees.
Enhancing positive wellbeing
At Tarmac, we strive to create a culture that enables positive wellbeing. Wellbeing is the feeling of being happy, healthy and comfortable, and this can mean different things to different people. It is important for us to remember wellbeing isn’t just about mental health, it is affected by several different elements, including physical, social and financial wellbeing. We want to build an environment where everyone feels supported, informed and energised to perform at their best – and having positive wellbeing is one of the ways we can achieve this.
We continue to keep our intranet and rewards website wellbeing pages and employee communities up to date with new resources. We also hold regular employee ‘Listen & Learn’ webinars, covering all areas of wellbeing. During 2022, our employee assistance programme (EAP) confidentially helped individuals who reached out for support on a wide range of topics which may otherwise have gone un-supported.
Mental wellbeing
In 2021, we launched employee communities on our intranet, and these have continued to grow throughout 2022. Our health and wellbeing community has over 330 members and, the community’s intranet page had over 1,700 views over the year. This community is a place where our employees can discuss all aspects of their wellbeing and share useful resources with peers.
We also continued to take part in awareness raising events, such as mental health awareness week, where we shared our ‘Reach out’ campaign to encourage employees to ask for help if they need it and for colleagues to check in on each other.
Physical wellbeing
In November, over 130 employees from across Tarmac took part in our 30-day plank challenge for Movember. This company-wide physical challenge encouraged colleagues to take part in a progressive 30-day plank challenge. The plank exercise can help with full alignment, stability and tension as it works your full body, strengthens your lower back and can help improve posture.
Financial wellbeing
Financial wellbeing is the term we use when referring to a person’s overall financial health. With rising energy and food bills, 2022 was a challenging year for many people across the UK, and we have measures in place to support employees. We use our employee intranet and wellbeing hub through our rewards programme to regularly share information and tools like budget planners and calculators to support financial wellbeing. We also continue to partner with Salary Finance – a financial wellbeing provider that aims to help people become financially happier and healthier. Through tools and education, they support colleagues in taking practical steps to take control of their money and become more financially resilient.
To help spread further awareness of financial wellbeing, our rewards team also visited various sites throughout the year to further educate and inform employees on the resources we have available.
Social wellbeing
We continued the development of our employee communities and supported the establishment of three new communities in 2022; Go digital, Early careers and Ex-armed forces and emergency services. Our employee communities provide a place for colleagues to connect and share about things that matter to them. As an example, our health and wellbeing community hosts monthly ‘brew Fridays' as a place to check in with colleagues and share stories or tips relating to health and wellbeing. These have been so popular throughout 2022 that there will now be two brew Fridays every month in 2023.
Looking forward
Safety is a priority for our business. We will continue to drive towards our goal of zero-harm and promote positive wellbeing in all areas. Following on from the successful roll out of our safety plan we also aim to launch a wellbeing plan in 2023. We will continue to deliver mental health first aider training and keep medical screenings on track. We will also promote positive health and wellbeing through our communities, events and wellbeing centres and increase the visibility of the resources we have to offer to our employees.
