Page 1750 - Xmo Strata - Bulletin Archive

Safety, Health, Environmental & Quality Bulletin No 665

28 March 2019

Employee Health, Safety and Welfare

We have a legal responsibility for employee safety, but more importantly, we want to encourage both a
safe and a healthy workforce, hence setting up an Employee Assistance Plan more than 7 years ago that
offer on line and face to face counselling for both work related and personal challenges that you face,
engaging you all in annual medicals, mental health awareness training and more recently furnishing our
offices with desks that allow staff to work from either a sitting or a standing position.

Several years ago, we sent company vehicle drivers on RoSPA driver training courses, have engaged
many of you in specific skip pan and ABS braking training and have installed speed limiters and driver
performance management software in all company vans, that enable us to measure braking, speeding,
lane changing and cornering performance.

Our approach to improving driver safety has always been to encourage participation and engagement,
but even since clients have introduced penalties for employees who speed when working on their
contracts, we still see far too many examples of this.

RoSPA reports that in 2015, 217 people were killed in crashes involving someone exceeding the speed
limit and a further 132 people died when someone was travelling too fast for the conditions, therefore
this is something that we feel we must manage more robustly and have spoken to our HR advisors and
made the following specific reference to speeding in our Employee Handbook.

Page 21- SPEEDING

In circumstances where you are caught speeding in a company registered vehicle, you will be
responsible for paying the fine and in some cases a deduction may be taken from you wages to
cover this. Repeated speeding offences will trigger the appropriate disciplinary action.

As we have reiterated on many occasions, we want every employee to go home safely to their family at
the end of every week and as such ask all employees to plan enough time to ensure they reach their
destination safely and never have to speed or drive unsafely to reach it. Journey planning is equally
important as job planning and should be given the same priority.

We are all a product of learning. Every skill we have; everything we know; everything we believe and everything we do has
been learned throughout the course of our lives. Some of us learn best by studying graphs and charts, some through visual
presentations, and some by reading detailed text books. It is important that we receive information in a format that works for
us as individuals! That’s why at Xmo Strata we use a variety of communication platforms such as bulletins, newsletters,
videos etc. However, if you feel there is a better way for us to share health and safety information, please let us know.
Ultimately, your safety is in your hands – but we will do all we can to keep you well informed!