In recent years, it is not surprising that financial services organisations have been looking even more closely for ways to improve health and safety at work. Finding new ways to prioritise stakeholder wellbeing, ensuring that offices are physically safe and empowering employees to adapt have become increasingly crucial.
For one global banking client, this topic remains high on the agenda. ISS has worked alongside the client to ensure that employees are safe at work and well-informed about high-risk activities.
Martin Svenstrup, Global Head of Technical Services at ISS, explains: “A real focus of our commitment to the client was the improvement to their HSEQ culture, to ensure that the organisation’s ‘ways of working’ were integrated into how employees operate day-to-day—rather than as a bolt-on to standard work practices.”
Mitigating risk and supporting placemakers
To move towards this goal, HSEQ compliance plans were drawn up and agreed upon across all countries and main facilities.
The proposals focused on six key deliverables, which ranged from monthly inspections and training and compliance to Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), local implementation of the organisation’s Sustainability programme, online ‘single point’ incident recording and the delivery of Group HSEQ activities on each facility.
ISS and its client then worked closely together to deploy initiatives specifically tailored to each of these areas. This included developing a new risk assessment tool to provide evaluation data—and offering training to team leaders while supporting placemakers to create and maintain a safe working environment.
The HSEQ plan also ran a training activity last year where someone pretended to go against the company’s security policy. Colleagues participating in the exercise were encouraged to draw on their knowledge of the existing strategy and were rewarded if they successfully intervened.
“Bringing the compliance plan to life”
“We are underpinning the safety culture by bringing the compliance plan to life via the training programme, ensuring placemakers are trained for the task they are asked to do—and giving them the authority to ‘stop and ask!’ if they believe the task or local environment is unsafe to continue,” Martin explains.
By working together on a variety of initiatives—bolstered by the HSEQ compliance plans and the inclusion of themed awareness activities around important global and ISS awareness days—ISS and its client continues to make quantifiable progress in the HSEQ space.
