Health, safety and wellbeing
VolkerStevin recognises that it has a legal and moral duty of care for the health, safety and welfare of its employees and those that may be affected by our activities.
Health and safety is at the top of our agenda and we continually strive to prevent work related injuries and the ill-health of our employees and anyone associated with our activities, whilst also improving their wellbeing.
Health and safety at VolkerStevin
VolkerStevin’s behavioural change programme, ‘Safety Ripple’ – represents the ‘ripple’ effect as the programme reaches out to all employees, putting safety decision-making in their hands and ensuring everyone takes responsibility.
We regularly train everyone in our business about Safety Ripple and encourage them to play an active role in developing safer ways of working - through inductions, solutions groups, site safety huddles, risks and behaviour identification workshops, and two-way daily briefings that include the question “how are we doing?” A network of health and safety champions help embed the culture on sites and provide feedback to continually improve.
As well as Safety Ripple, we task our engineers and construction professionals with coming up with better and safer ways of building infrastructure and integrating it into its environment. This includes routinely exploring offsite construction opportunities, using 3D and 4D models as part of a safe by design approach. Our digital team are continually trialling the new technology that will allow us to construct in the future even more safely.
We provide detailed training, supervision, competency checks and equipment to make sure everyone working at or visiting our sites understand their roles and responsibilities and are well looked after. We encourage and listen to feedback to continually improve the way we do things.
We provide a safe working environment in which employees can continue their personal development and build a culture in which ethical business practice thrives.
Looking after our people
We place great emphasis on looking after the physical and mental wellbeing of our people. We recognise that to continue tackling health risks in construction, both physical and mental, we must first raise awareness amongst our staff, and offer support and guidance towards maintaining an environment free of work-related ill-health.
Maintaining the mental health of employees is a key part of our occupational health strategy. In addition to health surveillance we place a particular focus on raising awareness of the importance of maintaining good mental health.
Our occupational health team run regular physical and mental health awareness campaigns and offer free and regular health screening and advice, as well as ensuring no work tasks have a detrimental impact on anyone’s health. We also have a network of trained mental health champions, who are trained by Mental Health England and are able to signpost their colleagues to the appropriate support.
Quality Ripple – Getting it right from the start
Through our ‘Quality Ripple’ standards, we have a positive, inclusive and future focussed approach to quality. Our people take pride in getting it right from the start and we ensure they have the knowledge and tools to achieve this and encourage membership of professional bodies such as the Institution of Civil Engineers.
We have drawn on lessons from our award-winning Safety Ripple behavioural change programme: we believe people own what they help to create, Quality Ripple has been designed to achieve improvement through engagement. It has three main objectives: (1) creating a positive quality culture; (2) improving consistency; and (3) reducing errors.
By taking advantage of digital planning, engineering, and information management tools we allow mistakes to be identified and rectified. Clients and end users to inspect plans before physical works even begin, striving to get it right first time, efficiently and safely.
All this is underpinned by our ISO 9001:2015 accredited quality management system.