Background: A Crisis and Its Aftermath
In 2017, a major manufacturing firm in Northwest England experienced a workplace fatality, resulting in a £130,000 prosecution. Initial safety measures brought short-term improvements, but incident rates soon began to rise again. Despite implementing new processes and completing IOSH Behavioural Safety training, the Health & Safety Manager struggled to find practical, lasting solutions. The senior management team reached out for help as they were aware there was something wrong with their safety culture.
After reading one of my published articles on behavioural safety, the company reached out for support.
Strategic Intervention: Embedding a Behavioural Safety Culture
I began with a deep-dive into the organisation’s structure, communication channels, and operational culture as well as their safety culture. I reviewed their Vision, Purpose, and Values in the context of production realities. We aligned safety with core business metrics: production, sales, and profit. Reducing a target for production was initially a barrier until it was found that the error rate and cost of damaged product also reduced. The improvement in safety performance also resulted in fewer reject on the production line.
From this foundation, I designed a tiered behavioural safety training and coaching programme:
- Board-Level Coaching: Interactive workshops with directors focused on real business scenarios. Key behavioural outputs were agreed and embedded into downstream training.
- Manager Engagement: Line managers received tailored sessions built around the same strategic themes, ensuring message consistency and leadership alignment.
- Whole-Workforce Inclusion: Training extended beyond production to departments often excluded from safety initiatives—sales, finance, and support teams. Each session fed insights back to the board about their culture and how this impacted their health and safety culture.
A final coaching round-up with directors incorporated staff feedback. Some of the feedback was already known by the senior team whilst some feedback came as a surprise. There was clearly a need to improve safety leadership and to set boundaries about behaviours that were acceptable and unacceptable. Some of the workers were influencers through humour, cultivating an unspoken hierarchy, behaving as though they were untouchable and free to ignore standards because nothing had ever challenged them before. This was addressed promptly once it was understood by senior managers, who by now had a much better understanding of what “good” looked like in terms of safety culture. This led to tangible changes in hygiene, communication, team inclusion, and performance targets.
Outcomes: Culture Shift and Measurable Impact
- Staff reported feeling heard, not lectured—boosting engagement and morale.
- Frontline ownership of safety issues fed directly into process reviews.
- Workplace conditions improved, fostering a more proactive safety culture.
- Accident rate dropped by over 65%.
- Zero RIDDORs recorded the following year.
For those of you who are interested in knowing more about behavioural safety, the Health & Safety Executive (HSE) provide a range of free guidance resources which, one of which can be found here.
