WesTrac a winner at workplace health and safety awards

WesTrac’s in-house staff engagement program - Built By Us, has been named the Best Enterprise Safety Program Initiative at the recent Australian Workplace Health and Safety Awards.

The dealership, which services Caterpillar customers across WA, NSW and the ACT, received the award last week from the Australian Institute of Health and Safety, which holds the annual awards program.

The idea for the program came about when a downturn in mining in 2015 triggered a raft of staff redundancies at WesTrac, which impacted employee engagement and safety performance.

WesTrac realised that something needed to change and hence approached workplace culture consultancy, Interchange, to create a tailor made solution in order to improve the culture at WesTrac.

Through the initial discovery phase, Interchange identified five core themes as the areas of opportunity for WesTrac, addressing accountability, recognition & feedback, teamwork, inclusion and leading change. These themes went on to form the foundation of the solution.

Using a human centered design approach, WesTrac and Interchange co-designed and developed the cultural and safety transformation program, known as the Built By Us Program, with the goal to create a workplace that was safe, productive, engaged and customer focussed.

The program involved a series of five phases, which included a range of engagement and learning activities for staff members, and for leaders, a series of coaching sessions.

A key element of the program was the embed phase, which was reliant on WesTrac continuing to implement a range of initiatives to support further improvements to company culture and safety performance.

Chief Executive for WesTrac WA, Jarvas Croome, said there had been a visible change in culture since the implementation of the program.

“I am proud to see a shift in our culture, with our team members embracing Built By Us, looking out for each other and displaying our values in action,” Croome said.

“With the mindset that culture is a driver and safety is an outcome, we are also seeing a decreasing trend in lagging measures such as TRIFR and increased quality in leading measures since commencing the program.”

NSW and ACT Chief Executive, Greg Graham, said engagement scores across the business had improved, with WA seeing a 21 per cent lift and NSW an increase of 16 per cent over a 12-month period.

“We can already see the shift in our culture and look forward to continuing in the direction we’re headed,” Graham said.

WesTrac was also nominated as a finalist for two other awards including best health and wellbeing initiative, and health and safety innovation.