Challenge
With nearly 220,000 employees worldwide, Veolia Group provides water, waste and energy management services to a wide range of industry sectors. Due to the nature of its business activities, one of the biggest safety issues for Veolia is hand safety – indeed, recent analysis of safety incidents across the organisation reveals that 33% of all incidents involve hand injuries. As a result, Veolia decided to prioritise a global focus for a Safety Reset on hand safety in 2022.
However building employee engagement and ownership of a safety improvement drive in any large organisation is no easy task. In a lot of companies, many safety initiatives fail to make a meaningful difference in either safe behaviours or safety performance, and the initial reaction of the workforce to a new campaign is often “here we go again with yet another new safety initiative”.
Now throw into the mix another important development. In 2021 Veolia and SUEZ reached an agreement to merge operations in several countries around the world - this included the former SUEZ Recycling and Recovery operations being acquired by Veolia in Australia. After many months of regulatory reviews and hard work, the integration of the two businesses locally commenced in early 2022. This brings together a workforce of 4,700 people from Veolia and 2,100 from SUEZ across Australia and New Zealand.
Solution
Veolia decided to organise a company conference in early June 2022 on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland. The theme of the conference was “Together To Turn The Tide”, a strategic imperative of the merged organisation aimed at bringing the strengths of Veolia and SUEZ together to create a champion of ecological transformation that offers customers access to an ever-broader range of services and new innovations.
This was the first opportunity in a long time that Veolia had to bring together in one place more than 270 senior leaders and emerging leaders from around Australia, and also the first opportunity to do so since the merger.
After first being introduced to the Helping Hands – Hand and Finger Preservation Program at a Safer Together Industry Safety Forum in 2017, Veolia concluded that Helping Hands would be an ideal fit for their upcoming conference, not only as an engagement activity that could serve as a team-building exercise, but also as a means to bring to the forefront the Safety Reset on hand safety and embed the work that had been done to date by Veolia on this important topic.
The centrepiece of the program is an innovative workshop exercise in which participants immobilise their dominant hand. They then work in a small team to build a prosthetic hand. The prosthetic hands that are built during the exercise are then distributed to amputee landmine victims throughout the developing world.
Result
Veolia set up the table groups at the conference in such a way that different business entities and geographical locations were mixed together, ensuring each person was sitting next to someone they didn’t know. As a team-building exercise, the Helping Hands activity was a great way for people to “break the ice” and get to know one another.
Working in groups of three of four, with all participants’ dominant hand disabled, 75 prosthetic hands were built. Safer Together has partnered with the Helping Hands Program to donate these prosthetic hands to amputee land mine victims in the developing world.
The unique nature of the activity meant that the audience was not subjected to “death by PowerPoint” or safety statistics to deliver the safety message.
The activity was very well received by the conference attendees. Working without the use of their dominant hand really helped them experience how difficult their working life would be if they were to suffer a debilitating hand injury. It also provided an opportunity to reflect on the impact that such an injury would have on their life outside of work. This ensured that the participants were left in no doubt about the critical importance of their hands, and the emotional connection achieved made it much more likely that they will take the learnings from this activity back to their people in Veolia’s operations throughout Australia.
Safer Together was able to provide not only the materials for the workshop, but also on-the-ground facilitation and logistical support to run the activity at the Veolia conference event. From submitting the initial request through to delivery of the workshop, the whole process only took about 4 weeks from start to finish.
Veolia’s senior line leaders have embraced Helping Hands because they can see for themselves the benefits:
“Just last week the Western Corridor Recycled Water Scheme team asked me if we could have the Helping Hands session as a reward for successfully completing a recent project. It was great to see the team requesting Helping Hands as a reward, something they wanted to do together rather than the standard site barbecue.” (General Manager QLD, Veolia Water Operations)
“The best safety engagement session I have ever been to” (Veolia conference attendee)
“I’ll remember this forever” (Veolia conference attendee)
- Safer Together – this “outside the box” safety awareness activity creates a strong emotional connection that makes it memorable and leaves a lasting impression on participants which they then take back to their teams. The organisation’s safety function can then leverage that emotional connection to consolidate a range of safety improvements.
- Continuously Improving Together – the nature and format of the Helping Hands activity helps to create a unified team that share a common purpose.
Lessons Learnt
Secrecy helps Success – Not revealing in advance anything about the Helping Hands activity will help to magnify the impact of the learning experience for participants and create a lasting impact.
Space to Breathe – Don’t be tempted to compress the timeframe for the activity. Give it time at the end for participants to have an opportunity to reflect back on and discuss with each other what they got out of it.
Invest in a Facilitator – Particularly with a large group, having an experienced facilitator who is very familiar with the Helping Hands activity adds to the participants’ learning experience.
Download the Case Study Poster here.
For more information about Veolia ANZ click here.
For more information about Safer Together’s Helping Hands service offering click here.