Health, safety and wellbeing is of primary importance to Interserve Construction and is a journey that needs constant focus. We aim to be the best in our field and make sure our workforce, and those affected by our activities, go home safe and well to their families, every single day. During 2019, we developed and implemented new cultural and wellbeing initiatives as part of our commitment to continual improvement. These initiatives have taken our already strong health, safety and wellbeing culture to the next level to protect our most precious assets – our people.
I-Care
Interserve commenced the roll out of I-Care behavioural training in 2019. I-Care is a bespoke approach to health, safety and environment culture based on caring, doing the right thing and speaking up. The aim of I-Care is to bring the best of our existing cultural safety initiatives together with industry best practice, giving us a consistent, long-term and company-wide approach. We are seeing results from this programme with improved AIR, AFR and RIDDOR performance.
Mental Health First Aiders
At the start of 2019, we introduced our Mental Health First Aid wellbeing initiative. Our aim is to raise awareness and remove the stigma of mental health issues, ensuring our workforce is aware of the sources of help available to them.
Since its introduction, the initiative has been an overwhelming success and we now have 140 trained Mental Health First Aiders across the business with 30 of those in the North East, one in every five members of staff within the region.
Health, safety and wellbeing campaigns
Part of Interserve’s approach means looking after our health and wellbeing at work and outside of work too. The aim is to empower and support our workforce to make lifestyle choices that will help to maintain or improve overall health. We ran three national health and wellbeing campaigns in 2019, covering stress, skincare and hydration. In the North East, we expanded on this with a monthly schedule of toolbox talk topics including sleep, cancer self-checking and mindfulness, led by our North East health and safety forum.
COVID‐19
The COVID‐19 pandemic has brought unprecedented challenges to the way we work. Interserve has taken significant measures
to ensure our site operations can continue, where it is safe and effective to do so, while protecting our staff, suppliers,
customers and members of the public. We have introduced our own requirements for the sites, in‐line with the UK
Government and the Construction Leadership Council (CLC) guidelines. We have embraced technology and collaborative
software for meetings, project communications, site tours and sharing information.
Key achievements
- Within Interserve we have 140 trained Mental Health First Aiders, with 30 of those in the North East Region – 1 in every 5 members of staff.
- Our behavioural health and safety programme is resulting in improved AIR, AFR and RIDDOR performance.
- We have embedded behavioural and wellbeing awareness in our culture.
