Amey Consulting’s ThinkSafe project has won a prestigious Zuritanken award from Amey’s parent company Ferrovial. Zuritanken is an idea generation programme open to all Ferrovial employees worldwide and aims to promote a culture of innovation to solve challenges faced by the business. At the 5th edition of the programme held virtually in February, ThinkSafe came out on top against a shortlist of six from a total of 364 global entries.
Led by Rob Doyle, HSEQ Director, Amey Consulting and Raj Kandola, Human Factors Business Partner, Amey Consulting, ThinkSafe is a series of toolkits, which provide high quality data, beyond traditional safety metrics to examine the psychological and human factor variables associated with safety; such as workload, job pressure and safety climate.
It utilises a ‘bottom-up’ approach to understand the risk of everyday activities, putting people at the heart of improvements through consultation and involvement. The project came out of a need to address the shortcomings of using traditional methods such as root cause analysis, audits and accident data to understand risk and reduce accidents. Although useful, these approaches are considered somewhat reactive, therefore potentially posing a safety risk.
ThinkSafe has continually helped provide insight into other contributory factors of safety and wellbeing and has been rolled out to over 5,000 employees across Amey. The findings have been used to develop specific action plans to address areas of weakness identified by the results.
The ThinkSafe methodology has also been utilised to tackle other business needs and challenges. Most recently, COVID-19 presented a number of wellbeing challenges including the effects of long-term teleworking and in 2020, the ThinkSafe framework was used to create a bespoke survey (called Future Office) which was completed by over 1,500 employees in Amey Consulting. The results gathered through this survey have helped to inform a range of follow up initiatives.
Alex Gilbert, Managing Director for Amey Consulting said: “This is a fantastic achievement for Amey Consulting. Combining our expertise in data with our strong history in operational health and safety, ThinkSafe was developed to better understand and address the human factors that impact safety and wellbeing, something that has become even more significant in the last 12 months.
“The Zuritanken award is testament to the culture of innovation at Amey Consulting, giving our people the freedom to develop their ideas to solve real world problems.”
This is not the first accolade for the project. In 2020, ThinkSafe won RoSPA’s ‘Initiative of the Year’ Award. As part of winning Zuritanken, Amey Consulting will now work with Ferrovial on expanding ThinkSafe globally.