Building the safety culture at Legacy Support
BBA Aviation's Legacy Support businesses have a history of low incident rates, established procedures for near miss reporting and proactive safety management. In the event of an incident, the company takes immediate measures to investigate the root cause and to ensure that all managers are reinforcing safety awareness and practices.
However, the senior management and HSE teams at each Legacy Support location recognise that more can be done to enhance the safety culture within the business, and proactively involve all employees in the visible drive for continuous improvement in safety performance.
A positive safety culture where all employees take responsibility for their own safety and the safety of others requires: leadership; employee involvement; measurement systems and a continuous improvement process. With measurement systems already in place, the HSE team set out to create a safety management framework comprising a set of employee and management committees, each with a specific focus, for example injury prevention, hazard identification and evaluation and emergency preparedness and response.
Each meets regularly to monitor the progress in their area of focus. Employees and the management team are regularly rotated from committee to committee so that knowledge can be shared and each individual can build his or her skills and overall safety awareness.
Senior members of the Legacy Support team are charged with ensuring that all components of the safety culture framework are in place and that committee recommendations are acted upon. The new approach is already in place at Legacy Support’s facility in Chatsworth, California; is being rolled out to the facilities in Houston, Texas and Slough in the UK; and will also be implemented at the company’s new location at Cheltenham, UK.
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As a two year member of the HSE Committee, I experience at first hand the benefits of Ontic's safety management framework and safety culture. We are all encouraged to become more active participants - informed and proactive. The willingness of all employees to notice and respond to unsafe situations that could affect overall plant safety shows in our safety performance and in our overall wellbeing.’
Denise A. Williams - Chatsworth HSE Committee Member
