EnerMech’s Safety Agents Drive Change

James Cassin, EnerMech QHSE director looks at how the company’s innovative ENERGISE 2 programme is leading the way on health and safety training

If life during a global pandemic has taught us anything, it’s how compassionate, resilient, and adaptable we can be. And for many, it’s been a time to take stock and reassess what matters the most, the health and wellbeing of their nearest and dearest.

As we mark World Day for Safety and Health at Work, with its theme “act together to build a positive safety and health culture”, we can also reflect on how supporting one another continues to be the focus for a safe and successful workplace at EnerMech.

Our company motto is “I am safe, we are safer”, which is about the importance of every individual in the business working collaboratively as part of the team, for benefit of us all. We are committed to continually developing and supporting a workplace culture that puts the health and safety of our people, our customers, and our planet at the forefront of all we do.

We are proud of our health and safety record, but not complacent, and we never stop looking at ways that we can do more to better protect our employees, and to achieve our goal to ensure everyone goes home safe every day.

This is why we introduced ENERGISE 2, a sea change in how we deliver health and safety training to all our employees in a leadership position while continuing to complement the existing day-to day-safety training across all levels of the business.

ENERGISE 2 is a leadership training programme giving delegates more control to become agents for change. It is highly interactive and introspective encouraging and enabling a more proactive approach to improving workplace health and safety.

In partnership with our facilitators Karin Ovari and Andrew Burton, we delivered the first four courses on a face-to-face basis, but when the onset of COVID-19 and the pandemic changed the way the world worked and did business, we quickly adapted it from a live training programme to a virtual one.

This evolution proved highly successful. Two years on from the launch, over 250 leaders have completed the course, and we are already seeing the safety culture of the business making a shift in tandem with that.

Open to all personnel in leadership roles, it is built around a combination of workshops, coaching and walk-in sessions. It challenges delegates to look at their strengths and weaknesses, how they address those within the team and how they can effectively manage their own behaviours to invigorate their team’s safety performance. This helps them develop an overall understanding of what energises people to ensure better safety performance.

Cumulatively, completing all the elements of ENERGISE 2 is a four-month journey which gives five days of guidance, with ongoing access to coaches thereafter. And it’s this last element which makes the programmes so unique and effective. By providing access to further coaching, we are continuing to develop the skills of our leaders ensuring they can mentor their teams and strengthen our business.

Our motto at EnerMech is “I am safe, we are safer” and the results of our recent 2022 employee survey demonstrate that there is an increased awareness of this powerful statement’s meaning and importance.

With greater employee engagement reported across the business since we rolled out this training, we are in collective agreement that EnerMech has a strong safety culture and that we have a shared responsibility to one another to continue focusing on the safety of our actions to maintain this.