Senior plc Case Study

How meerkats, elephants and a blind man helped change a safety culture.

Senior plc is an international manufacturer of technology components and systems for the aerospace, automotive, defence and energy markets.  With operations spread over 11 countries, the Senior plc Group is made up of 26 different companies.

While Senior has steadily achieved commendable improvements in overall safety performance, the company identified issues surrounding the existing accident reporting system.  Senior’s dedicated safety team saw the need for improvements in culture and behaviour, within various areas of the group.

The company set about creating culture change campaigns using two of Lattitude’s training programmes; All For One – The Meerkat Way and Hindsight – The Ken Woodward Story.

Senior focused on establishing stronger safety-based relationships with individuals and their families.  The safety team came up with several highly creative solutions, such as running meerkat safety awards, themed family days and even sponsoring meerkats at San Diego Zoo.  The company found that the Meerkat Safety® approach was ideally suited to uniting and engaging teams during its motivational management initiative.

Alongside its successful meerkat safety campaign, Senior also found that there were underlying behavioural challenges which required a more sobering, harder hitting message.  Using Hindsight – The Ken Woodward Story, Senior re-structured its initial orientation training to include the programme, as well as developing the ‘Zero-Zero-One Hundred’ campaign to improve reporting, which included staff committing to personal improvements in safety behaviour.

Senior have recently introduced Giants Of Leadership, to follow on from the success of their meerkat training campaign by reaching out to the supervisors and leaders within the organisation.  This has successfully reinforced the improvement of behavioural change and teamwork.

Since introducing and adapting Lattitude’s training material, the company has seen an impressive about turn by its people in safety reporting, at all levels.  Senior have highlighted this serious change in the behaviour of its employees as a major achievement.

James Pomeroy (Global ESH Manager)explained, “While in the past we had a good safety performance our accident triangle was less triangular and more of a diamond shape. This is because we had relatively few reported near misses and consequent opportunities to learn and improve our approach to safety.  Our latest campaigns now mean that our culture has change, with people feeling more engaged and comfortable with sharing their safety experiences, good or bad, meaning we’re now able to take appropriate action to keep everyone safe.”