This company is an environmental company that operates in the national and international arena. For almost 90 years, they have been active in recovering and reusing energy and raw materials from waste. Their business consists of strong waste-processing companies and they have become the market leader in the Netherlands.
Key to their success has been matching their processes to the needs of their clients. Efficiency, sustainability, safe working and low costs are their guiding principles, and therefore they are constantly optimising their technology. It is their way of contributing to a clean-living environment.
Their 800 enthusiastic and committed employees process 3.5 million tons of waste per year at 15 operational sites in the Netherlands.
The Issue:
Back in 2015, the organisation was dealing with a number of safety related incidents and accidents and had requested an independent assessment to define their overall Safety Culture at that present time. Even though their performance was still better than the industry average, the CEO wanted to see a significant change in the way that their Safety Culture was developing over the past years. Unlike other companies in their industry, their trend was moving upwards, where the industry trend was moving downwards. See graph below to see their historical performance on Lost Time Injury Frequency Rate vs Target and Industry standard.
As a result of the assessment, the organisation had decided to embark on an organisational transformation journey in which they wanted to address a number of key issues in order to make significant progress on embedding the right standards, practices and behaviours to continuously improve their Safety Culture and, in turn, their overall safety performance.
The first 15 months of the transformation journey had not provided them with the results they were hoping for and they decided to change the type of consultancy support they were getting.
The CEO had defined a number of ambitious targets for the organisation to reach and the progress on these targets was not as promising as could be expected in order to ensure that they would be able to reach these targets within the 9 months remaining.
What we did:
We reviewed the independent Safety Assessment guide that set the standard expected at each site, and for each individual, based on the areas of Safety to be measured.
Thanks to our specialty in being able to generate engagement at various levels of the organisation in the shortest possible timeframe, together with the support of the Executive Leadership Team, we were able to focus on a number of strategic initiatives which quickly turned the overall safety climate into our favour. We saw more engagement from individuals at various locations, from the CEO down to the working interface, all committed to ensure that the ambitious targets could still be met.
We made some minor changes to the overall organisational transformation roadmap and focused on those areas which would yield the highest potential for engagement.
We conducted a series of workshops by site where we defined the ideal future stage for each site, the corresponding Action Plans to get there, and the role of each leader and individual within it. This was an essential step to ensure that we would be able to still meet this very aggressive goal within the 8 remaining months of the year! We also developed a series of individual coaching rounds by site and individual and included safety as the number 1 area in Performance Evaluation, blessed by the CEO.
Last but not least, we defined a number of key areas for development which we implemented through a series of working groups, in which employees and leaders from various locations and disciplines came together to produce a sustainable result in each of these areas. Thanks to these working groups, we were able to engage a large percentage of the organisation, produce a number of critical standards organisation-wide and implement a series of best practices that resulted in a significant drop in their safety injury data by the end of that year.
The Result:
After 8 months the approach had been implemented perfectly, with a significant drop in their safety injury data by the end of that year. On top of that, we had reached the ambitious targets set by the CEO. The implementation had worked that well that the CEO decided to continue the journey, thanks to the progress we were making, and set two new ambitious goals to be realised by the end of 2019. Half-way through the second phase of the organisational transformation initiative, we have already reached one of these goals and are working hard for the remainder of 2019 to ensure that we are able to reach the second ambitious goal as well.
The Organisational Transformation journey has been well adopted by all levels and locations across the organisation. The main focus for the remainder of the year is to continue to work on the sustainability of the culture change, so that the organisation has the maturity and capability to continue their journey also without our guidance and support.
With the initiatives that are being rolled out in 2019, we are confident that we will also be able to reach this goal on target and on budget.
