Outstanding health and safety
Our outstanding health and safety record is built on solid foundations, encompassing robust compliance frameworks and a comprehensive management methodology. This is encapsulated in our Group-wide code of conduct – ‘The Wincanton Way’.
Wincanton’s outstanding health and safety record sets it apart from competition and leads the industry standard in the UK and internationally. During new business integration, as we onboard new customers, improvements are delivered with tangible results in accident reduction, reduced liability claims, brand protection and increased colleague engagement.
Good health and safety makes excellent business sense. We have worked hard to build a comprehensive understanding of how health and safety can affect the whole business if not managed comprehensively. We firmly believe in driving this progressive approach – every day, without fail.
During the year, we retained our sharp focus on our Lost Time Injury Frequency Rate
(LTIFR) measure. We exceeded our target of 0.37 and delivered an LTIFR of 0.33 against
a backdrop of busy implementations of new business, ensuring that our safety standards
are present from the outset.
Wincanton is a people business, so excellent health and safety starts with ensuring all our colleagues – no matter where they sit in the organisation – are safe at all times and that their health, including mental health, is a key consideration. We are a learning organisation, always improving and innovating to achieve pioneering standards which go above and beyond compliance. We recognise the reputation of our brand and our customers’ brands are important to the future growth and resilience of our business and we work hard to protect them.
Dean Clamp
Group Operations Director
What makes Wincanton special?
It’s in our cultural DNA
The corporate culture of safety excellence starts with measurements across several well targeted areas, based on a balanced scorecard reflecting customer-facing, internal and colleague-focused performance indicators. We maintain and continuously improve robust metrics, for example lost-time injury frequency rate (LTIFR), collisions per million kilometres (CMK), total incident frequency rate (TIFR), near-miss reporting and safety conversation reporting.
Leading from the top
Health and safety performance is consistently led from the top, not just managed at operational level. Wincanton’s senior management buy-in and involvement have been extremely powerful for creating industry-leading health and safety performance.
Doing the right thing
This everyday behaviour demonstrates that, on top of our excellent safety management, we have a deeply embedded attitude that is a true differentiator for building a best-in-class health and safety culture. It’s all about ‘doing the right thing’. Doing the right thing requires that we challenge unsafe behaviours and demand that our colleagues have a zero-tolerance attitude to cutting corners when managing safety at work.
HSE is an essential part of our approach to recruitment and managing people
We promise our colleagues we will look after them and ensure a safe and comfortable working environment. From the outset we set our bar to the highest level so that once people start working in our warehouses, driving community or management team, everyone knows what's expected of them. This drives employee engagement and sets Wincanton apart as a great – and safe – place to work.
We are accountable
Our industry-leading safety performance speaks for itself; however it’s the safety culture that truly sets us apart and differentiates Wincanton from competition.
Standards and metrics
Our management philosophy is supported by several metrics and indicators which we rigorously maintain and continuously improve. For the purposes of benchmarking across the industry, lost-time injury frequency rate (LTIFR) is the main comparator. We are incredibly proud of having progressively reduced LTIFR to 0.33. This remains the best industry performance to date.
Awards
A snapshot of our most recent industry awards celebrating our health and safety performance can be found on the Awards page.
Highlights
our lost-time injury frequency rate is just 0.33 per 100,000 hours – 77.39% less than 2012/13
508,187 safety conversations were conducted throughout the business, including peer-on-peer conversations. 83.7% of these conversations were positive and proactive
we completed 237 independent safety audits (representing a 47.6% increase) and 228 Covid19 compliance audits
collisions per million kilometres (CMK)
total incident frequency rate (TIFR)
near-miss rate
our in-house training team provides over 120 different internal training programmes that help us to achieve excellence in safety
colleagues upskilled
Data sourced from the last financial year
Working with external partners
Wincanton plays an active role in local communities and engages with several external organisations as part of our management of health and safety performance across the organisation.
