United Infrastructure (previously United Living Group) specialises in delivering critical infrastructure to communities across the UK. Its services are split into two key areas:
Utility Infrastructure, including carbon capture and storage, gas, water and wastewater, electrical networks, telecoms and EV installation.
Social Infrastructure, including property retrofitting, building safety, planned maintenance and community regeneration.
They employ 2,200 people, with a national supply chain network of over 2,000 resources supporting their projects.
I’m confident to say we have safer projects because we have people who understand hazards and risks better.
– Sean Luchmun Chief SHEQ & People Officer
Hazards spotted by employees are known as “close calls” in the group. When Chief SHEQ & People Officer Sean Luchmun arrived in January 2022 there was a trickle of close call reports. There was a need to encourage more hazard reporting among employees in a positive, stigma-free way.
“We had a clear conversation at board level,” recalls Sean, “and said ‘we are a business with a turnover of £550 million and a direct workforce of around 2,000 employees and we are getting 250 close calls reported a month. That’s not where we want to be’. “
“The consensus was that we wanted to be closer to 2,000 [reports] a month, one per person.”
To address this, United Infrastructure embarked on an ambitious health and safety transformation programme, working closely with EcoOnline to increase their close call reporting rates across the business.
So I joined the organisation in January and we got round the table and essentially we had a look at the data that we did have because we’d had ECO online now for twelve months as partnership. And we looked at our data and the truth is our incident rates were just far too high. And I know that’s not just the only measure, there’s many other measures, but fundamentally we sat round the table and said, we’re really not comfortable with this position, we need to do something about it. And we benchmarked ourselves against competition and industry and we were higher. And that was an uncomfortable place for us to be as an exec team. So we went, right, okay, revise the strategy. There’s a number of aims and objectives within that strategy of which the close call reporting element comes into one of about twelve strategic things that we’ve done over the past twelve months. And that’s where it all started really in terms of that conversation. And more into the detail of the close call reporting campaign, we did a lot around the leadership messaging. We created a lovely video, which I’m happy to share with anyone who wants to get in contact with me. It’s called our Don’t Walk By video based on a poem by Don Morell, who’s an ex oil and gas industry worker, who saw one of his colleagues doing something unsafely. And and sadly, he didn’t intervene, and they ended up having an incident and losing their life. And he now writes poems to raise awareness and try and encourage people to step in at the critical moment. So we use that poem to create a video using our own people, and we’ve released that into the business with education material and just constant kind of reminders and help and the dashboards and many other things. And that’s where we’ve seen our culture just really open up and people get on board with it. It would be really interesting just to see some of the results you’ve got in that form, in the format that you actually look at them. Yeah sure, let me share the dashboard and I can certainly show you. So I have two key dashboards, Louie. One is a reactive board and we just let it load, but it covers some of the call it the industry key metrics around rid or accident frequency rates, which when I was telling you the story around, okay, where are we? When I joined the business, we were showing a peak of around zero point two five. I think anyone within within our profession would would say that’s clearly far too high. Most of the competition is around zero point one and you can see the the journey we’ve been on to to bring those rates down and we’re we’re at zero point one now. I’d like to think that that’s going to continue. In terms of all injury frequency rate, anything from a non loss time incident all the way up to the more severe. Again, just from a rate perspective, you can see it’s significantly coming down by nearly fifty percent. And I don’t rely on accident rates. I just use that to set the scene with my exec team to say there’s too much harm in our business and they agreed and we’ve done something about it. If I take you to what I think is the more important dashboard is our proactive dashboard. And this is all around our close call reporting. So have I got a culture of people in the business that are prepared to step in at the critical moment? My data tells me I have. I used to have one hundred and fifty six reports in December of last year. I’ve now got two thousand seven hundred and one as of today in this month. And that shows me that the reporting culture and the willingness to do it, the empowerment of our people, they feel comfortable to to do it. And you can see it’s growing month on month. The same with our inspections. I mean, not enough visible leadership in in the business when I joined. We’re only doing a hundred and sixteen inspections. We’re now doing over a thousand inspections each month. So we’re assuring ourselves that our people are working to the highest of standards. And because we’re doing that, we know that we’re putting people to work and we’re monitoring them and they’re working safely. And if they need support, they’ve got a supervisor or a manager or a leader who engages with them, who cares about them, and they can ask them to support them if they need to. We’ve also got some other neat metrics as well, which we use is how many actions are being generated from our inspections. So again, you can see very, very, very low numbers before I introduce this KPI because I want good quality inspections that we’re finding things and we’re able to correct it. If we’re going to spend the time of doing inspections, let’s do them properly. So there’s some really mature conversations around generating actions, and you can now see that we’re getting a really healthy amount of actions from our inspections. They’re good quality inspections. So I think this is how a dashboard can really help to drive your key behaviours and the quality of what you’re doing. This is actually, yeah, mean, I can see, I think we can all see the results. And that’s about, so that’s more than one report per month per employee, isn’t it, from across the board? Yeah, so for direct employees now, if I look at, yeah, that’s over one per direct employee. If I stop sharing the dashboard just for a moment, we are actually about to embark on the Eco online at the moment, we only have the ability for direct employees to report onto the system. We’re about to open that up to guests, so our subcontractors, and we’re about to release the QR code reporting. And again, when we talk about our mission to promote this culture and make it more simple and easier for people to report, this is where we’re going with Eco Online and our partnership. We’re gonna roll out QR code reporting. Anyone with a mobile device, you get a unique QR code for that project. We can put them up in all places around each site. Very simply, take your mobile phone, QR codes, put in a little bit of messaging around what you’ve seen and what you’ve done. Do you need some follow-up? In it goes to the system into the project management team. And that’s what we’re looking at next to get us our next big step change.
Encouraging positive behaviour change – with visible results
The company launched a cultural change programme with several strands, one of which – using the slogan “Don’t walk by” – motivates employees not to see close calls as something stigmatising or worthy of blame.
Instead, it encourages them to act positively when they saw hazardous behaviour or conditions. This was aided by rolling out EcoOnline’s Quick Report system across all business operations.
Quick Reports can be filed by site managers and project managers via laptop. Site operatives can use mobile phones or submit paper slips to make their Quick Reports.
Rather than focusing on accident rates and remedial work to prevent injuries recurring, the change programme, including close call reporting, is creating a culture where everyone is focused on making the workplace safer.
Better reporting. Safer sites.
The average safety team spends eighteen minutes logging a single incident, often starting with a paper form leading to data loss and slow follow-up. ECO online fundamentally redesigns incident workflow. An employee can use their phone to log an injury, near miss, in under sixty seconds using location services, voice to text notes, and photo upload. The system instantly categorizes the incident and automatically assigns the investigation task to the correct supervisor based on department location. No manual emails required. We also provide a dashboard that tracks overdue preventative actions, guaranteeing nothing falls through the cracks. Workflow analyses are integrated directly into the incident record, ensuring supervisors capture root causes, not just symptoms. This forty percent time saving lets you focus on prevention, not paperwork. Ready to reclaim your time? Book a personalized workflow analysis for your safety management team now.
“We reinforced the messaging month on month and we’ve seen the improvements as a result,” says Luchmun of the change campaign.
Those improvements are impressive. The number of close-call notifications has risen steadily in 10 months from 250 a month to 2,500. Significantly, over the same period, the group’s rate of reportable accidents under the RIDDOR has more than halved, as has the all-injury rate.
Accessible reporting leading to targeted interventions
The changes made as a result of reports are fed back to employees via channels such as “you said … we did” boards on sites, SHEQ newsletters, SHEQ forums and town hall meetings.
What did the close-calls tell them? Analysis of the Quick Reports, which integrate with United Infrastructure’s EHS system, has given Luchmun and his team insights on how to improve protection such as
mandating eye protection on the construction sites and
focusing campaigns on the higher frequency, lower severity issues such as slip and trip hazards
campaigns on the rarer but higher consequence issues such as work at height or around electrical supplies.
“We can target our interventions based on data that is ours and we know it’s real,” he says. The differing volume of reports also gives the safety teams a steer of where in the organisation to concentrate their efforts in developing the safety culture further.
With EcoOnline we have flipped it from a reactive conversation about incidents to a proactive one where we can drive performance.
– Sean Luchmun Chief SHEQ & People Officer
What does the future hold? Further expansion of reporting on site
The next step will be to extend the system to take in United Infrastructure’s subcontractors – who can make up 90% of the workforce on sites where the company is principal contractor.
EcoOnline’s Quick Report allows guests access to the system by scanning a QR code with their phones. “Potentially we will display individual QR codes on each project and subcontractors, visitors, members of the public can log what they’ve seen.” says Sean. This extension could increase the number of reports fourfold. “I imagine we’ll take another huge leap forward,” he adds.
Overall, the change campaign, including close-call reporting, has started a real shift in culture and produced meaningful results in incident rates. “I’m confident to say we have safer projects,” says Sean,“because we have people who understand hazards and risks better and feel more empowered to identify them and fix them. That gives the board confidence that we should go and do more. That it’s worth putting more energy and effort into SHEQ agenda, into more close-call reporting and inspections. And that’s a really good place to be!”
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