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Bouygues Construction: a strong company health and safety culture

On World Day for Safety and Health at Work, we take a look at how Bouygues Construction equips its leaders with the knowledge to build a strong company health and safety culture.

Health and safety leadership

Developed six years ago, Bouygues’ four Health and Safety Modules are designed to equip company managers with a comprehensive understanding of effective health and safety measures. With a solid grounding in the area, leaders can then model this behaviour within the company more broadly.

The training starts with managers attending a real-life court case, organised by Bouygues’ own lawyers and barristers. After this, staff gain both an external and an internal perspective on health and safety culture through workshops led by expert Dr Steve Kelsey and by Dean Murphy, Bouygues’ UK Director of Health, Safety, Wellbeing & Quality.

“These focus on themes like ‘nudge theory’: the idea that subtle behavioural changes can help guide staff towards making the right health and safety decisions,” Dean Murphy explains.

Attendees are presented with their own ‘Health and Safety Leadership Passport’ and challenged to make changes in themselves, their teams and the workplace. As the final step in the process, commitments are scored and, if they pass, managers are designated ‘Leaders in Health and Safety’ at Bouygues.

This year, Bouygues will be developing its health and safety modules through the addition of a fifth stage, focusing on the supply chain. The company already takes care to ensure that its standards are respected during interactions with suppliers and clients through its ActSafe audit system. It is also the UK’s only construction firm employing its own in-house ergonomist.

Building through COVID

Bouygues’ strong foundations in health and safety protocols helped it to formulate an effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic, driven by rapid and effective communication within the company.

Taking advantage of its global procurement network, Bouygues was able to quickly get hold of personal protective equipment for staff working across various different environments. Staff were provided with up-to-date guidance reviewed on a daily then weekly basis.

Every Bouygues workplace was also equipped with testing facilities and 400,000 lateral flow tests were acquired for staff to use, helping the company to keep functioning in spite of lockdown restrictions.

Maintaining progress: focusing on success and improvement

Bouygues assesses its performance, success and improvements with KPIs centred on Leadership indicators and not lagging indicators.

This ensures the Business measures success and not failure, building on good practices: rewarding positives and sharing these around the Business.

Whilst this may be slightly easier to collect and manage, lagging indicators in fact make it more difficult to achieve and drive change.

“Leading indicators measure collective success where lagging indicators measure failure,” says Dean Murphy.

Bouygues Construction is a global player in construction, with operations in over 60 countries. It designs, builds and operates projects in the sectors of building, infrastructure and industry.
Operating in the UK for over 20 years, we have grown our businesses in the sectors of building (Bouygues UK), civil works (Bouygues Travaux Publics and VSL), energy and services (Bouygues Energies & Services), and property development (Linkcity).