GKN Aerospace
Behavioural Safety

GKN Aerospace is one of the world's largest and most successful engineering companies, with operations in 35 countries employing over 44,000 staff and a history spanning over 250 years they have a well-deserved reputation for manufacturing excellence. As well as maintaining a strong focus on production quality, the organisation is equally committed to safety excellence and their aim is to completely eradicate preventable accidents.

Following the successful delivery of a short but highly memorable session at GKN’s annual Senior Manager’s conference, GKN Aerospace UK asked our specialist Health and Safety Facilitator Matt Cleve to deliver a series of sessions to both the leaders and their teams at three of their UK sites: at Filton, Yeovil and the Isle of Wight.

The Challenge

As well as designing a session that would be engaging and stimulating for delegates from across the organisation; the sheer numbers involved gave our Project Management team an extra challenge of creating a schedule to deliver a programme to approximately 1800 staff working in various locations and shift patterns.

Following a period of consultancy where we visited each site and conducted a wide-ranging safety survey with all staff which thoroughly assessed current attitudes toward safety, we designed a session to support GKN’s Chief Executive’s (Nigel Stein) objective to make safety the number one priority.

Building on existing initiatives including the “Think Safe” and “Don’t walk by” campaigns, the learning objectives included:

1. Identifying the difference between safety management and examining the way an outstanding leader challenges unsafe behaviour
2. Actively engaging all staff to contributing to improving H&S
3. Encouraging participants to take personal responsibility for H&S rather than abdicating this to the H&S Manager or Advisor

Our Solution

In a thoroughly interactive and often surprising programme we delivered a series of sessions that whilst tailored for each of the three sites, did contain common themes:

• Health & Safety is not just about having rules
• A sustainable culture is one where people want to work safely, and to do this, they must have not only the right knowledge and skills, but also the right attitude
• Committing to making H&S GKN’s #1 priority so that everyone goes home safely at the end of every working day

In order to challenge our delegates to think differently and take individual ownership of safety, the sessions featured a cast of 4 actors who delivered a series of theatrical scenes based on familiar characters on location at GKN. This helped create a strong emotional link to safety in general and more specifically it allowed our audience to better understand how attitudes influence safe (or not!) behaviours.

Our specialist facilitator Matt Cleve challenged the delegates to take a fresh perspective to safety and in a series of activities and discussions he delivered a session that was both thoroughly provocative and highly inspirational.

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