Amanda Owen MBE, Director of Health, Safety and Welfare at London Heathrow Airport, details the airport’s approach to occupational safety and the work it does to ensure passenger safety.
Credit: LHR.
Airports are fascinating and challenging places where we must keep everyone safe and ensure they reach their destinations and homes safe and healthy. From a safety perspective, there’s no place like the airport. Of course, there’s no place like Heathrow Airport, a key national piece of national infrastructure, a global brand and the UK’s hub serving over 200 destinations.
Perhaps most importantly, every airport is an ecosystem. Heathrow’s ecosystem is made up of hundreds of companies and tens of thousands of people, known as Team Heathrow, serving millions of passengers. The safety of everyone passing through the airport, including passengers and colleagues, is the result of countless daily decisions made by the people who keep Heathrow running.
The airport’s board and executive team have set a strategic goal to lead the airport industry in setting the highest occupational safety standards by 2026. But as they say, culture eats strategy for breakfast.
Heathrow Airport’s approach to safety culture
Like many others, I believe that culture is revealed by how people behave when no one is looking. There are many factors that influence culture. Our approach needed to be comprehensive, yet as easy to understand as possible.
From that thinking, the framework for Heathrow’s safety culture was born. It includes 20 key elements that come together to create a safer culture. These are grouped into the following pillars: Safe and healthy work. Safe and sound teams and safe and sound decisions. The information provided by the Bradley Curve is one in which most, if not all, of the components are familiar to safety professionals and further focuses on “sound mind.”
Lessons from the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19)
While the framework itself is based on established safety models combined with forward thinking on human factors, Heathrow’s approach to its development and implementation is based on lessons learned from COVID-19. I am.
As we were developing our framework and strategy, the pandemic hit. While its effects are still being felt in our industry and more widely, COVID-19 has taught us a lot about the value of close collaboration. The close relationships built throughout the pandemic that were necessary to lead the response gave us an advantage in developing a one-team mindset. Heathrow Airport has been able to work with the government and partners to facilitate the UK’s largest private coronavirus testing facility, and has been ranked in the top 4 for a UK airport in the Skytrax Covid-19 safety rating. Earned a star.
The only way to drive the highest safety standards in Heathrow Airport’s complex ecosystem is by working with the Team Heathrow organization. Building on existing collaboration, Emma Gilthorpe, Chief Operating Officer of Heathrow Airport, has invited senior operational leaders from across Team Heathrow Airport to a safety summit in June 2022, and has confirmed her commitment to safety for herself and the board. We shared our efforts and invited these organizations to measure their safety culture together. Consistent method.
Amanda Owen signs the Team Heathrow Safety Declaration. Credit: LHR
Measuring safety culture
To ensure consistent and robust measurement, Heathrow Airport partnered with Safe365, a leader in enabling businesses to assess, manage and improve their safety culture.
For the first round of measurement, Heathrow kept it simple by measuring against the 10 elements of the Safety Culture Framework. Despite the simple approach, the results provide important insights for individual organizations and Team Heathrow’s safety culture in terms of where existing good practice can be leveraged and where resources should be prioritized. I did.
Let’s work together to improve
Results and insights will be shared with operational leaders at the second Safety Summit in October 2022, where Emma Gilthorpe called on Team Heathrow to commit to working together to deliver the highest safety standards. .
Our first task was to define and agree our collective goals as Heathrow’s leadership team across the ecosystem. The Team Heathrow Safety Council, a group of the Team Heathrow organization’s most senior health and safety leaders, worked together to define our approach to safety. This is the first symbolic act that begins to establish our common language and common focus on safety. This safety commitment was signed by leaders across Heathrow Airport on Thursday 26 April 2023.
Credit: LHR
So what’s next?
A second round of measurements is currently underway and the results will be presented to Team Heathrow’s operational leaders as part of Airport Safety Week in November. This time, we took full advantage of Safe365’s digital platform, benchmark data set, and robust question set to measure all 20 elements in the framework using a five-point maturity assessment.
As a result, each organization will receive a “Safety Culture Index score.” These are then aggregated into an airport-wide team Heathrow score. Heathrow’s Internal Safety Culture Index is currently 73%, slightly above the UK standard of 56%, but still below the highest standards we aspire to.
Measuring safety culture will be a hallmark of future safety management methods, but it is much more than that.
Benchmarking occupational safety performance across airports is not easy given the complexity of operations. The traditional measure of Lost Time Injury Frequency Rate (LTIFR) tells us something, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. Importantly, LTIFR does not help identify and share good practices so that “a rising tide lifts all ships.”
That’s why we’re starting to work with other airports to create safety culture benchmarks specifically for airports. We are in discussions with a number of airports and are pleased that the management of Matar’s Hamad International Airport (DIA) has recognized the value of our approach to safety culture measurement.
Michael McMillan, Senior Vice President, Facilities Management, Hamad International Airport, said: Our five-year strategy includes a commitment to benchmarking to enable us to share our best practices and learnings with colleagues. Airports are unique environments so we are pleased to work with specialist service providers to assess safety culture and to work with Heathrow Airport to create safety benchmarks for international airports. ”
As we see in other industries, it takes time for a safety culture to mature. The hallmark of a mature culture is learning, which is the main purpose of safety culture benchmarking: gaining insights from within the organization and learning from other organizations.
If your airport would like to learn more about our approach or participate in a safety culture assessment, we would love to hear from you.
Global Safety, Health and Welfare Director and Board Member of Heathrow Airport; amanda owen‘s career spans risk management and global safety, health and welfare across retail, banking, healthcare and aviation. In 2019 she returned to Heathrow Airport to lead Safety, Health and Wellbeing. Prior to her work at Heathrow Airport, she held global risk and safety leadership positions at Bupa and the Royal Bank of Scotland. Amanda is known for advocating for gender equality and safety leadership in the aviation industry, and she is vice chair of Green Corridor, a charity for young people with special educational needs. I am. She is a Certified Safety Practitioner. She has a degree in economics. She holds a Master’s degree in Security and Information Technology (IT), and a Master of Laws in Employment Law. She was awarded her MBE in the 2021 New Year Honors, particularly for her transport services during the coronavirus pandemic.