Skanska Cementation Foundations partners with JMJ, reducing injury rates by 75% in four years

Business challenges

The IIF engagement has, in partnership with Skanska Cementation Foundations, created an award-winning safety culture within the organization.

Part of the Skanska Group, Cementation Foundations is a market leader in its field in the construction industry. Cementation Foundations is the UK’s leading specialist piling and ground engineering company. It operates worldwide, with nearly a century of experience in multi-disciplined contracts from soil nails to diaphragm walls. The company offers its wide range of services as either a standalone or total foundation solution. These projects are often undertaken in difficult conditions and under time pressure as no other site work may progress until the foundations are satisfactorily completed.

The company typically works on about 200 projects per year, which are wide-ranging in terms of numbers of people involved, and usually consist of teams of between four to six people working together for six weeks on a project. These teams are interchangeable from the company’s six regional offices in the UK.

When JMJ began working with the company in the UK, Skanska Cementation Foundations had undertaken three HSE Climate Surveys in recent years. With approximately 500 staff, an open and honest “no blame” culture prevailed.

Even so, while Cementation Foundations felt that its safety performance was satisfactory, the overall mission of the JMJ Incident and Injury-Free (IIF) safety approach was to create a breakthrough to achieve “best in class” safety performance by changing the company’s safety culture. The objective was that everyone understood their responsibility for safety—individually and as part of a team—and their commitment to such an outcome.

Client goals:

• Generate an aligned, authentic commitment to Incident and Injury-Free results at both the individual and organizational level
• Create the culture and environment for IIF performance within the organization, which is demonstrated by individuals’ behaviors and attitudes
• Cause a shift from safety as a priority, to safety as a value, at both the organizational and individual levels
• Identify opportunities to improve the safety process; surface the perceptions, assumptions and beliefs held by the organization’s personnel, which cause them to behave in certain ways with regard to safety
• Establish an ongoing coaching relationship with senior leadership and key management to support the generation of an Incident and Injury-Free workplace, while enhancing the organization’s overall business goals
• Generate sustainability of Incident and Injury-Free outcomes through training Cementation Foundations personnel to lead orientations and workshops for their teams

How JMJ helped:

JMJ led a full safety engagement for Skanska Cementation Foundations. This consisted of a diagnostic assessment, Leadership Safety Commitment Workshops, launching and supporting a Safety Leadership Team, Leadership Coaching and Train-the-Trainer events. Subsequently, JMJ has led refresher support for Cementation Foundations, including training additional staff to lead IIF safety briefings and supporting the client in developing internal safety briefings.

Client results:

The IIF™ safety engagement has, in partnership with Skanska Cementation Foundations, created an award-winning safety culture within the organization.

Skanska Cementation Foundations also won two prestigious industry awards for its safety program from Construction News magazine in 2008: the Exceptional Performance award, and the Ground Engineering award, both of which referenced the company’s stellar safety performance.