Best Safety Moment Awards Entry: Forth Ports (4)

Award Nomination:

Forth Port operates eight ports and employs 1,250 people in Scotland and Tilbury, Essex. 

Our Quay Shifts Cultural Maturity survey and workshops conducted in both 2021 and 2023 highlighted the value of having our leaderships focus on health and safety outcomes made very visible to our workforce. 

Two major initiatives have been instigated as a result of these findings being: 

1. Stand Down for Safety, and 

2. Visible Felt Leadership Key Performance Indicators 

Stand Down for Safety is an annual event where the business shuts down for three hour long sessions spread across the shift pattern to ensure that every member of the workforce is able to attend. 

A theme is given to each event with the 2022 theme of “Ready and Focused for Work”, the 2023 focus being “Are You Match Fit?” and the 2024 event themed on “The Way Forward”. 

Each event has been a combination of discussions, presentations and video materials to engage our workforce in meaningful conversations and provoke thought on how we perform in relation to health and safety and how we can improve. 

We conduct an After Action review after each of the events to allow us to continually develop the sessions and make them more effective. 

The Visible Felt Leadership KPI programme encourages leaders at all levels from Supervisor upward to conduct meaningful interactions with the workforce that reinforces our commitment to health and safety.  Each member of the leadership team has an annual target that is monitored for completion and for quality of interaction to ensure the most benefit is gained. 

Additional Information

In 2021 our initial Cultural Survey “Quay Shifts” highlighted the need to have our leadership be more visible to the workforce and to ensure the commitment and focus the leadership has is clear and apparent to our teams.  We started a programme of annual Stand Down for Safety Events in 2022 and launched a Visible Felt Leadership Key Performance Indicators initiative. 

Stand Down for Safety

In 2022 we held our first full operational Stand Down for Safety with all of our 1,250 employees invited to attend an hour long session at each of our ports.  Each Port held sessions to ensure all shifts could attend. 

The focus of the initial event was “Ready and Focused For Work” and contained a conversational between our Chief Operating Officer and the Port Director for Tilbury, a success story from one of our businesses and a video from a motivational safety speaker followed by a discussion forum.  An event specific gift was handed out at the end of each session to all attendees. 

The event went well although the After Action Review gave us learning we could use to improve on for the 2023 session these being: 

• Discussions didn’t work that well in some locations due to the number of attendees (Over 300 in one port) 

• Video was impactful but not as good as the live sessions 

• Success story did not really give learning and felt a bit of a lecture. (Operation was not a port but rather a towing company) 

• We were asked to include mental health when we spoke about health and safety 

For the 2023 session we approached it with these lesson in mind.  We invited questions in advance of the session which were then answered by the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Operating Officer live via video link from Tilbury at the beginning of each session.  We then had a guest speaker who was to talk on how getting the components of every job right one at a time and having the right team around you resulted in performance excellence. This was followed by a short video presentation from one of our Occupational Health Nurses on mental health and a video where one of our long serving operatives spoke about his own mental health challenge and how he had overcome it with help from the business and our EAP. 

Again another event specific gift was handed out at the end of each session. 

The AAR gave us the following learnings: 

• The live responses from our leaders worked well with the honesty appreciated 

• The mental health section particularly the operatives piece was very impactful “it was one of our own” 

• The third party speaker was less successful in parts.  The content was quite motivational but the duration was too long 

• Handing out shirts was a mistake that created a large amount of preparatory work and the issuing at the end was chaotic. 

• It felt like this event was too Tilbury centric with all the live speakers presenting from there. 

For 2024 our plan again has taken this learning into account. Our programme is as follows. We start with our outgoing CEO and Chief Financial Officer discussing his thoughts on our safety journey to date.  Where we were compared to where we are and why we need to do something different.  This followed by some of our long serving employees discussing their early experience of health and safety in the company. 

The next section is some of our new hires discussing their first impressions of health and safety as they join our organisation. We then have a review of a major improvement exercise that took place at the end of last year in Grangemouth and a review of the impacts of an incident on our employees at Tilbury. Finally our Chief Executive Officer Designate will outline his view of why we need to do more, why we need to do something different and what his vision is for the health and Safety performance of the business. For this event we are extending our invitation to our contractors and other stakeholders 

In 2022 and 2023 we saw significant improvements to our safety performance in the three months post the events. Our challenge is to reinforce that impact and retain momentum following the 2024 event.  We have a series of H&S Roadshows planned and are providing specific conversation aides to our leaders to reinforce the messages the event will deliver.