Kellogg's scoops behavioural safety prize

News | HSW
02.02.2007

A significant increase in near-miss reporting and a 60% combined reduction in lost-time and minor injuries have helped Kellogg Supply Services' Manchester plant win the top behavioural-safety award from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) and behavioural-safety consultancy Ryder-Marsh.

Kellogg's Manchester beat four other finalists to the Allan Poole Award for Outstanding Achievement at the Behavioural Safety User Conference in December.

Kellogg's first looked at behavioural safety in 2003. Richard Jones, health, safety and environment manager at the Manchester site, told HSW that despite a good record in safety - including RoSPA Gold Awards and the Sir George Earle Trophy (see left) - the company felt there was more that could be done to reduce accident rates. "We spent a lot of money on all the traditional stuff like guarding and we'd just completed a programme of upgrading PPE, and yet we were still having a lot of lost time for minor injuries," he explained. "The root cause in a lot of these was the behavioural, people factor."

Jones appealed for volunteers from the workforce, and selected a core team of 11 - two people from each shift plus a day-based person. "Not all of the people who volunteered were safety reps," said Jones, "and one of the hardest bits was to get our people to buy into and support something that wasn't traditional, safety-rep orientated."

The 11 volunteers had a two-day training session with Ryder-Marsh and then presented to Kellogg's management. They formed the PARK team - Promoting Accident Reduction at Kellogg - and were responsible for managing, communicating, selling and delivering the project, with support and resources from management. Jones meets the PARK group every month, and there is a quarterly review with a management steering group.

"In the past, people would come to us with a problem and say, 'what are you going to do about it?' With the PARK behavioural safety group, they not only identify the problem but they come up with a selection of what they call 'easy' and 'hard' solutions," explained Jones. An easy solution might be extra signage, he says; a hard one might be changing something in the structure of the building to make things safer.

"The PARK team has now done over 50 000 safe and unsafe-act observations," Jones said. "That gives you a lot of positive interaction with the people on site."