To mark the arrival of Alistair Phillips-Davies as new Chief Executive of SSE, we invited a number of important organisations and individuals to pose a question they’d most like him to answer, and he has been doing so all week.
Today, he answers a question from one of our employees about the importance of safety at work.
Gavin Stewart, Technical Staff Trainee, Scottish and Southern Energy Power Distribution:
The former chief executive strived to reach zero incidents which has resulted in a decrease in accidents, how do you plan to further reduce these incidents in the future and do you have any new goals or safety rules for the company?
Alistair:
There is a change in CEO but not a change in priorities. Safety remains my top priority. I am committed to doing things safely or not at all and to ensuring that you, all employees and contractors, remain safe at work and can go home to your family at the end of each day. There are some areas where we will change, but this is not one of them. The safety culture we have built up is critical.
In my first week I have had a lot to think about, but I was reassured that in every internal meeting I attended, safety was on the agenda. At our weekly safety-specific call we discuss any serious incidents and also wider safety trends. This meeting ensures that we stay on top of things.
However, safety at SSE is a collective responsibility. All staff need to play a part, whether you are a trainee like yourself, a supervisor or anyone else. SSE’s Safety Family is our way of making sure that we continue to improve our safety culture and I have had great feedback that it is starting to make a real difference, although there is more work to be done. Making a difference to contractor safety is just as important though and a lot of work has been, and is being, done on this area as well.
Across SSE there is no doubt that there is a real commitment to safety, we all work hard at it and we all get it right most of the time. The challenge for us all is to get it right all of the time and continually improve. That's the goal. Performance must not become static as there is too much at stake.
For me, all this is about acting safely, in SSE and out of it. There is the danger that we can fall into the old mindsets of "Seen it all before", "It won't happen to me", or "I'm already safe". We must fight those mindsets. Someone joked to me about how you can spot an SSE person in Perth just by their behaviour and the way they hold their handrails and reverse park. Good, we should be proud of that.