Virtus x Havio: Building Better Safety Standards

My family’s background is in haulage, demolition, and waste management, so since I was 5-6, I have been in my dad’s lorry and on construction sites. I love the people there and the diverse characters that you get. At the end of school, I had multiple career choices, including risk management and insurance broking. In the end, I chose health and safety. I liked that I had to win over people who didn’t want me there.

So, through Havio, I had the highest qualification you could have in the industry by the time I was 20. Then, three years later, I had the opportunity to buy 50% of the company. That was 2009, just after the financial crisis, so it was a tough time – construction was on its knees, but we got through it. From 2012, we caught the crest of a wave. There wasn’t any great strategy behind it, it was just that the market was increasing, and we really got back into construction. That’s what I always knew and loved.

I’ve always been very mindful that health and safety is not sexy and it hasn’t got a very good reputation. People don’t like you because of your job, and I didn’t like that. I then made it my mission to solve the question: how do we eradicate this wall? How do we let people interact with us and come away from it going: you know what, I didn’t expect that of that safety company or that health and safety person?

There’s a whole ecosystem around it. It’s about how you treat people, how you deliver stuff, how you empathise, and how you understand the challenges that they’re facing on a day-to-day basis. For health and safety to work, you need to take people on the journey with you. That’s always been the approach. We don’t police: we guide, we coach, we mentor.

Health and safety is never a company’s top priority, in my opinion. People fall into the trap of not thinking commercially, but if you aren’t a profitable, sustainable business, you’re not going to have to worry about keeping people safe. I think when you say those words to directors of businesses, they go, ‘Oh, someone who finally gets it.’ It doesn’t mean I don’t care for the people that are at the workface, but I believe that if I deal with it in this way, it’ll improve. You have to start at the leadership level, you have to speak their language.

Health and safety should also just be something that runs across as a value of the organisation. As a health and safety professional, you need to be able to wear many different hats, and you need to be able to talk to people at different levels. I’m not saying I get it right all the time, it’s taken 20 years to get to that level. The challenge for me is to be able to get my team to be able to shortcut my process and be able to have those conversations. Ultimately, it’s all about communication.

People are never the problem. In safety, you have two different kinds of approaches. Safety one is where you create a management system and discipline people according to it, disempowering them. I don’t believe that works. Then you have the other approach, which is what ours is based on, which is to empower people. You still have rules, but you engage with people instead. You say to them, ‘Look, health and safety
hasn’t been done for us. It’s been done for you so that you can go home safely to your wife, children, husband, etc.’

A lot of health and safety professionals either haven’t been taught the right way or they’ve got ingrained beliefs that that’s the way to do it. But I won’t allow that approach within this business. I can tolerate a lot of stuff, but if I see someone delivering health and safety in that way, that’s a big no.

Firstly, we are not an environmental consultancy. Not saying that we couldn’t do it, it’s just not our area of focus. But we are a B Corp company, so people, planet, and profit are all important to us. So, when Poppy came to us to highlight that our current inspection doesn’t quite cover what she needs, we had a conversation about what she requires. Then we came up with a solution and added it to our Altitude app. Now, every time we go to projects, 6/7 questions get asked that we review, instead of Poppy having to go on site all the time. It’s been successful.

In construction, sustainability is a bit of a buzzword. Some clients take more of an active interest, like Virtus, but a lot of contractors do it just because they have to. Interestingly, the demolition and waste industries have been clued in for a long time. If they can save and reuse materials, they earn money from it. It is this mindset that we need contractors to get behind with. Rather than forcing it upon them, they need to understand that it does have benefits, particularly monetary benefits.

You need to be careful with it. Essentially, you could have health and safety professionals who could tackle it, but they can’t be specialists at everything. They would have to look at excavations, scaffolding, fire safety, and then suddenly switch to mental health, which is very different. You can’t possibly do it all.

The world we’re living in is very tumultuous, and there are lots of shifts happening, so mental health awareness is great, but there’s a fine balance with it. Someone needs to nail why there are four times more people taking their lives in construction than in any other industry. It is all so complex. Coming back to the question, I would be very cautious about including it. We can talk about whether there are mental health initiatives or if processes are being followed, but it is tricky when you go into the specifics of individual people.

We used to complete our reports using pen and paper. No one could read my writing, so 15 years ago I decided to invest in a platform, Altitude, which at the time was relatively revolutionary and has since evolved, as the company has grown.

Instead of walking around with their head in a pad the whole time, I wanted our health and safety professionals to create something that allows them to engage, not to form fill. Alongside this, in the background, we have an algorithm that allows us to look at hotspots and trends, which we can then tailor to our clients. Now we’re looking at how we can put AI into that. I’ve got so many ideas, but I haven’t got deep enough pockets to put them into action.

The biggest shift is the Building Safety Act, which we have purposefully kept out of. You’ve got people vying for positions in the market, saying they’re experts when they’re not – everyone’s still trying to find their way. They’re looking at competency, skills, knowledge, experience, and behaviours, which is what has let the industry down, i.e. the Grenfell fire disaster.

Another shift in the whole construction ecosystem is the skills shortage and the fact that the industry is terribly marketed. You can earn good money in construction, and you can get there in 5/6 years, but the industry doesn’t publicise that enough. Let’s be honest, construction is not going to stop any time soon, but it’s going to be an interesting time moving forward. I think there are big opportunities for companies that can set themselves apart.

Simplify. We’ve recently completed a full strategic review of the business. It’s very clear that we’ve built a business with too many clients, where many weren’t aligned with us, either financially or culturally. We have a way of working; they just want to tick the box.
So, we had 400 clients and now we have 220. We’re trying to collate a smaller pool of clients, but the right ones.

In health and safety, life is about doing a better job for your clients. We will keep innovating to provide as best level of service we can to our clients, with things like Altitude, and hopefully, contractors will think of us high up the list when considering health and safety consultants.

It should be a given that people go to work and not be adversely affected, but there is a lot of work to do. Even though we have got the numbers right down in terms of deaths on site, there are still too many.

I aim to try to keep things simple for people and want to work with as many as I can on the senior level, so it gets filtered down to where it will make a real impact. We need to try and speak commercially to clients. I want them to be able to manage their business and earn the money they need, but at the same time not have to adversely their workforce. If your people are happier, they are more productive and then you earn more money off the bottom line.