Nurturing a sustainable culture In the previous year, we took the opportunity to refresh our Purpose and our Values to make sure they were fit for the world we operated in and for the culture we wanted to create. In the face of the pandemic, and the unique challenges it presented, these Values – showing care, taking pride, having courage and embracing curiosity – provided solid and effective guidance for how we went about supporting our people and communities through the crisis. At our annual Company awards ceremony this year, we created specific awards to celebrate individuals or teams who had exemplified the very best of each of these Values throughout the year. As well as our Values, we have continued to promote our outlook on sustainability throughout the business, continuing our CEO’s employee roadshows and hosting specific leadership events to communicate our net zero commitment. This year’s new graduate intake embarked on a newly established project called ‘engaging the business on sustainability’. We are now integrating many of these ideas – presented to senior leaders within the business – within our wider engagement strategy – for example, the electric vehicle purchase scheme that every employee can now access. We created a number of internal initiatives this year to maintain momentum in our work on inclusion and belonging. This included talking about difficult subjects such a mental health, using a series of colleague-hosted podcasts to break down the stigma and give people confidence to share their own experiences. In March, we launched our campaign in support of No More, the global anti-domestic violence initiative, helping raise awareness and create a safe space for people at work. And finally, in response to the lockdown restrictions after Christmas, we launched our Share a Smile campaign, creating an opportunity for employees and their families to come together for a series of virtual fun events, including well-known stand-up comedians, pub quizzes, bingo and ‘rockaoke’. Each event brought a smile to over a thousand Severn Trenters and their families, to start 2021 with some cheer. High-risk activities Following the Wessex Water tragedy at Avonmouth, we conducted a full review of all our high-risk activities. Though we identified no material safety issues, and are managing these activities effectively, the review highlighted broader opportunities to undertake continuous improvement work related to some of our high-risk activities. These include building on our management information, ensuring clarity of responsibilities and advancing the overall safety competence of employees. Health & Safety Executive award In April, we won the prestigious Risk Reduction through Design award, for the work Network Maintenance Technician, Anthony Skellet, conducted with equipment provider Langham Industrial Controls to design out the musculoskeletal disorder risks of lifting heavy standpipes during routine flushing operations. Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents award In June, we received a Silver Achievement Health, Safety and Wellbeing award from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents for working hard to ensure our employees, customers and contractors could get home safely to their families at the end of every working day – in effect through our four-part strategy above. Partnership We continue to work with RoSPA and our trade unions to support our ‘whole person’ approach to health and safety. This uses the workplace as a conduit for broader improvements to individual safety and that of people’s families and the wider community. More accidents happen in the home than anywhere else, and the four hazards that cause the most harm at work also cause the most harm at home. Therefore the project focuses on safety outside of work as a great way to encourage our employees to take key safety messages into their homes and communities. Keeping our colleagues safe and secure during the pandemic During the Covid-19 pandemic, for those employees who need to attend a workplace, we’ve been ensuring these are Covid-secure, using extensive weekly risk assessments at all locations. However, over half our workforce has been working from home, and for those we’ve provided equipment such as laptops, keyboards and chairs, to ensure their workplaces meet the required standards. Creating appropriate wellbeing support We’ve been working closely with our three trade unions and senior company forum reps, with weekly sessions prioritising the health, safety and wellbeing of all colleagues. Through these, we believe our employees’ voice really did lead us through the year, which was very much one of being able to care for colleagues through strong and regular communications. We developed a broad suite of help and support initiatives, including increasing awareness of mental health and promoting our employee assistance programme. This included our Share a Smile programme, helping connect people socially throughout the lockdowns. We haven’t just focused on people isolated as a result of lockdown, but also on keeping people safe when they enter customers’ homes, and on communications explaining to the public why we are out working on the roads during lockdown. We’ve maintained a watchful eye on anyone with a significant vulnerability or heightened reaction to the virus. Just over 1,000 employees responded to a question of whether they felt a degree of vulnerability, and each received a call from the HR team, who then maintained regular contact where appropriate. We also enabled some people who were shielding to come into the workplace but still have a degree of safe human contact. Domestic violence increased during the lockdown, and we engaged The Haven in Wolverhampton to provide training and tools for us to support colleagues who were affected or worried about their domestic safety. While we have retained everybody in work and paid our normal bonuses, we recognised the strain on households dependent on more than one source of income. So we also arranged access to new financial wellbeing tools that offered advice on Government support and various budgeting tools. A strong health and safety culture Our true ambition is for no one to get hurt or be made unwell by what they do at work. As our safety culture has evolved, we’ve seen significant improvements and would like to achieve an industry-leading lost-time incident (‘LTI’) rate of under 0.10. This is total incidents divided by total hours worked. For the year ended March 2021, we had 21 LTIs and will achieve our target for the year of an LTI rate of 0.16, making it our best safety performance ever (2019/20: 0.20). Health and safety strategy To improve performance, we have a simple but effective four-part strategy, understood by the whole business: 1. Focusing on the things that occur most frequently – the three areas that are our biggest causes of absence are: driving; manual handling, slips, trips and falls; and mental ill health. 2. Ensuring people understand our safety management systems, which provide resilience against harm. 3. Providing managers with real-time safety data as well as detailed monthly reports, so they can assess performance and make improvements. 4. Using data analytics to identify opportunities for improvement and target underperforming areas. By focusing for the last year on the things that occur most frequently, we have achieved the following: There has been a 53% reduction in all driving accidents, and a 67% reduction in driving accidents resulting in absence from work. We have seen a 45% reduction in all accidents causing musculoskeletal injuries that resulted in absence from work. Following a quarter’s focus, there was a 71% increase in the use of our Employee Assistance Programme, and the Occupational Health and Wellbeing team noticed a definite uptake in requests for training on mental health. Building a better business Supporting our employees Read more online Meet some of our Awesome Award winners Meet some of our Awesome Award winners Employee of the year: Neil Tsang of Customer Operations set his focus on how we can support our vulnerable customers with bottled water and alternative water supplies when things go wrong, which was particularly important in the challenging times of last year. Whatever time of day, night or weekend Neil was throwing himself into his work; he was always an inspiration to colleagues across the business. Embracing curiosity: The hard-working Nature-Based Solutions Team established a group to look at alternative, more natural options for removing phosphorous, currently our biggest pollutant risk. The group has helped come up with an industry-leading matrix that will not only help us meet our tight compliance limits, but also reduce our carbon footprint, and all at a sensible and manageable cost. Showing care: Hayley Locking of Customer Operations cares deeply about nurturing newcomers within our business, helping them reach their full potential and have the best start possible to their career at Severn Trent. She invests much of her own time in support. Many apprentices who have gone on to be successful in their roles have spent part of their apprenticeship with Hayley. Having courage: Natasha Haywood of HR has taken the co-chair role of the LGBTQ+ network in her stride and has acted as an LGBTQ+ mentor, working to create an inclusive culture at Severn Trent. She’s also shown an immense amount of personal courage in describing her own experiences and stories to help educate others and raise awareness of LGBTQ+ issues. Taking pride: Gulbinder Sandhu of Customer Operations is the epitome of a Severn Trent unsung hero. He knows some very complicated stuff inside out and plays a crucial role in helping many people with data and information. But he never makes a fuss about it, so his huge contribution to the smooth running of the business is often overlooked.