Utility Week

UTILITY WEEK | FEBRUARY 2021 | 41 Operational Excellence wouldn't ask me to ring you back in two weeks and let you know how it's going. You'd be all over it. It would be an emergency'. "So the minute that you know someone is not doing well, we should be treating that with the same vigour as we would an asset failure, because it is an asset that is failing, and it's the most important asset too." Gee said Yorkshire Water had been very proactive in encouraging interaction with occupational health, including mandated mental health first aid training among man- agers, and had made the training available to any employee. In addition, the company had introduced team and individual stress risk assessments. "We've just audited them, and we're going to refurb and relaunch them, and we're going to ask our more senior manag- ers to look at the output, in conjunction with our safety officers, to understand where the work environment needs to be changed. We'll also overlay the outputs of the team stress risk assessments against the business plans, so that we can start getting smarter about projecting where we might have issues, particularly around the management of change." She added: "Last year, we had 1,920 referrals to the department and this year we've seen quite an increase. We've already had 1,864 referrals, and 1,200 of those were from April to the end of November. "Prior to Covid, the split was more demonstrative of muscular skeletal issues, whereas now 40 per cent of the referrals to occupational health are related to mental health." Targeted approach at Severn Trent A targeted approach to health and safety messaging, which saw a focus on a key area each quarter on a rolling basis, is paying dividends at Severn Trent. The new approach has seen a 12 per cent reduction in days lost to mental health, Claire Simmonds, health and safety business leader at Severn Trent, told the con- ference. "We've seen a 71 per cent increase in the use of our employee assistance pro- gramme in the nine months following the mental health quarter. It's been something that we've heavily pushed throughout the past six months, especially with Covid, but we were doing that before Covid as well. "For every ten people who were using the service before, we've now got seven more people that are using it, which is a heart- warming result. And it's the same when we talk about slips trips and falls, and for driv- ing – we're seeing it across all four quarters." Simmonds says before each quarter began, there would be meticulous planning and analysis of data within the business. The first two weeks of the quarter were about "hooking the business in and explaining the kinds of problems we were seeing. "We'd then move into weeks four to six where we'd start to share top tips, and do some challenges, followed in weeks seven to nine sharing new things and work differ- ently. Then finally in the closing weeks it would be time to get new things embedded, and changing procedures if we needed to as a result of something we'd discovered over that particular quarter." organisation, we already had a strategy in place prior to the pandemic. With things that worry people, like access to PPE, we'd ordered 25,000 sets of masks before it even became a pandemic – we knew what was coming. "Mature organisations like ours did a lot of work up front, and we had strategies in place which benefitted us massively. And that has a knock-on effect within the organi- sation on culture. Because if I'm saying to my workforce 'here's what we're doing in advance of potentially what's to come', peo- ple get a lot of confidence from that, from seeing that the leadership team are actually thinking about what's to come. "Nobody ever thought it would have the gravity it has, but it's all those things that give confidence to your workforce that ena- ble support to be there at the right time." An audience poll revealed that 94 per cent thought that their workforces had expe- rienced greater levels of stress since the pan- demic, and speakers were not surprised. Black remarked: "Stress can be a response to many things. It may be to the volume of work or the environment in which people find themselves working, but it might also be trying to do your child's homework, do the housework, and do your job. Or just fear of the unknown. It's all in there, mixed together." Denise Chevin, intelligence editor demic had brought to the fore the importance of treating each other with kindness. "The pandemic has demanded that we change how we apportion our time, and it has – bizarrely in some circumstances – con- nected us as humans. All businesses have to take onboard protection of their people's mental wellbeing going forward, pandemic or otherwise, because it affects productivity and bottom line, and profits. The pandemic has heightened the business awareness of those requirements, which is actually a posi- tive benefit." Karl Simons, chief health, safety and security officer at Thames Water, who also presented at the conference and took part in the Q&A, said that companies had learned a lot. "As a critical national infrastructure

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