Safe business

Our safety culture and zero-harm values are translated into guidelines, which we call our Golden Rules. Together with our Safety Improvement Plans, these underpin our approach to keeping employees and contractors safe. In 2011, we won four safety awards at the annual Mineral Products Association awards, recognising our strong performance on safety.

Read more about our MPA safety award win

Three key principles guide our approach to health and safety:

Zero mindset culture: we believe that all injuries and occupational illnesses are preventable.
A learning organisation: we are honest about mistakes and take all necessary steps to learn from incidents to prevent recurrence. We also carry out peer reviews to share experience across our sites and to explore areas for improvement.
Standards: we apply non-negotiable safety standards and rules consistently throughout the organisation.

Alongside our strong safety culture, we proactively promote good occupational health for our employees and contractors by identifying potential risks and implementing preventative measures. All our employees have routine health checks to ensure our people remain fit and healthy, and we monitor our operations and processes to reach our target of zero work-related illnesses at Tarmac.

Our actions

Safety, Health and Environment Framework

Tarmac’s Safety, Health and Environmental management system (SHE Framework) guides our approach to effective risk management in these areas. This is supported by a robust employee training and communications programme, strict safety procedures, and support from site-based and national SHE committees. Our SHE Framework gives employees the confidence to deal with health and safety risks and enables management and on-site staff to resolve these together.

Visible Felt Leadership

Our commitment to health and safety extends throughout the organisation, and our senior management helps to develop a strong safety culture by demonstrating Visible Felt Leadership. In 2011, we encouraged managers to increase the amount of time they spent discussing safety with their teams, through one-to-one ‘Safety Conversations’, coaching sessions and site tours. These activities contribute to the consistent high standards that ensure our business success. This year, we developed an ‘Operating Safely in Tarmac’ course for employees in supervisory roles, further equipping local site managers to keep our workplaces, employees and visitors safe at all our active quarries. The course reaffirms their on-site responsibilities, which are shaped by our SHE Framework.

Our Golden Rules

The Golden Rules set the guidelines for the standards and behaviours we expect from all employees and contractors, and we provide ongoing Golden Rules refresher training to reinforce and update their safety knowledge. Tarmac’s Golden Rules aim to minimise risk and eradicate unsafe behaviours in situations such as working at height, working with machinery, and working on our sites and in our offices.

Safety Improvement Plan

Improving safety performance is one of our key goals and we work collectively to achieve this year-on-year, as part of our ethos of ‘One Team One Plan’.

Our Safety Improvement Plan focuses on:

driving progress across the business through the senior leadership team’s vision, known as ‘Our Future State’
analysing previous incidents to inform our current approach to health and safety, including learning from employees’ feedback to deliver improvements
ensuring our standards are integrated at all levels of the business, guided by our Golden Rules
clear organisational accountabilities, supported by strong leadership and practical implementation across our operations
providing safety training that equips staff to manage high-risk situations.

Promoting zero harm

Our zero harm culture is central to the way we do business at Tarmac. Our new safety training for managers and renewed focus on Visible Felt Leadership among the senior management team have improved safety in our business. We constantly promote the ‘zero harm’ ethos and Golden Rules to all our employees and contractors, and encourage them to find solutions to prevent incidents occurring.

Improving quarry safety

We’re committed to ensuring the safety of our employees at work, and this is a particular focus at our sites. All our employees help to improve best practice at our quarries by recommending ways to improve the way we operate.