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Health, safety and wellbeing

VolkerWessels UK recognises that it has a legal and moral duty of care for the health, safety and welfare of our 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.

VolkerWessels UK maintains clearly defined management systems, interfaces and responsibilities that are understood and accepted by all. Maintaining effective oversight and scrutiny processes, carried out with independence and impartiality, we comply with corporative, legislative and other requirements and we always seek further improvements.

It is imperative that through the management and development of our employees, providing them with the necessary competence and understanding of their roles and responsibilities through training and supervision, we enable them to proactively contribute to the achievement of our objectives and the development of our professional risk and safety management culture.

Respect for people is innate within our company. We take into full consideration the needs and circumstances of all our employees, clients, colleagues and those we work with. We provide a safe working environment in which employees can continue their personal development and build a culture in which ethical business practice thrives.

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.

The VolkerWessels UK occupational health team aims to:

  • Educate employees and employers in the risks to health arising from work and other factors
  • Influence the attitudes and behaviour of employees and employers in relation to the promotion of health and wellbeing

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.

VolkerWessels UK has a full suite of company policies. To request a copy of any of our policies, please contact us here.

 

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, and using wearable technology such as the proximity alarms, which helped operatives maintain social distancing during the Coronavirus pandemic. Our digital team are continually trialling the new technology that will allow us to construct in the future even more safely.   

We follow stringent ISO 45001 accredited management systems that ensure our teams meet our responsibilities under the CDM Regulations 2015 and the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974. 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 also place great emphasis on looking after the  physical and mental wellbeing of our people.  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.

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