The British Glass Annual Health & Safety Conference and Exhibition, held at Mere Golf & Country Club in Knutsford on 2 November and hosted jointly with the Glass & Glazing Federation, was for another year a runaway success with a ‘full house’ of delegates enjoying this year’s theme of Worker Involvement – proving that companies that involve their workers not only improve safety performance but make their safety management systems more effective.
“Partnerships are essential for health and safety performance to be successful and involving the workforce means that health and safety becomes everybody's business,” said Declan Moore, British Glass’ Health & Safety Manager. “To reinforce the idea, we also launched our latest toolkit CD for the glass industry at the Conference which will enable organisations to put into place systems that will encourage both worker involvement and partnership working.”
Keynote speaker was Stewart Barnes, Divisional Director of HansenGroup whose speech, “Walking the Walk”, covered an organisational approach to worker involvement intended to lead to employee involvement and empowerment. With over 800 employees in five countries, Stewart works closely with the local and international senior management teams in the areas of strategy, sales, marketing, operations (lean) as well as developing the culture, leadership, communication and change processes. He specialises in leadership, culture and change management and is a guest lecturer on the full-time MBA and Change Management courses at Lancaster University. He also presented the prestigious Glass Charter Awards at the ceremony in the afternoon, now in their third year.
There were major celebrations as the following organisations were among the winners of Awards:
The Standard Patent Glazing Company Saint Gobain Eggborough
Brunner Mond Weatherseal
O-I UK Ltd Pilkington UK Ltd
Bowater Home Improvements Beatson Clark
Contract Glass Stevenson Reeves Ltd
Darby Glass Warmseal Windows
Rockware Glass Norman & Underwood
Contract Glass Launa Windows
The Overall Winners Category was won by Saint Gobain for their outstanding organisational achievements in health and safety as a whole.
The other items on the Conference Agenda this year comprised:
* Industry Support for Worker Involvement and the Benefits - British Glass' Alison Bettac-Rodgers
* Worker Involvement - A Manager's Story - David Graham, Optima
* Worker Involvement Project – a case study by Peter Green from Brunner Mond
* Worker Involvement - a case study by Sean Marsden from Pilkington Technology.
Guest – and mystery - speaker this year was European Minister for Social Policy, Professor Garreth Class providing his opinion on “respirable crystalline silica” in a slightly boring drone...until he revealed he was really… ex-rugby player and professional speaker with a first class honours degree in psychology, John Simonett: And the European Minister who had suggested banning tourists from windblown beaches and that Christmas holidays should be compulsory, whose name was an anagram of the ‘Glass Charter’, suddenly had everyone laughing and gasping at his magic tricks underlining his key point that “things are not always what they seem!”.
One of the points he made was that he assessed one company and found that only one in five people knew the goals of their company. Just think, he said, what would happen if, just looking at it in a different way, those statistics were found in a football team? It would mean only two out of eleven players know where the goal is and the other nine would be competing against the players in their own team; further only two would care! Another case of things not being always what they seem!
Sponsors of this year's Conference were Brunner Mond, Pilkington Glass, Rockware Glass, Saint Gobain UK, Float Glass Industries, Tornado Gloves, Euro Towers and Bohle UK.
Exhibitors this year were Tornado Gloves, Bohle Ltd UK, Swan Multimedia Ltd, J & K Ross Ltd, Quest Diagnostics, Bennett Safetywear Ltd, Load Hog, Westfield Health Scheme, Riskworks International Ltd, Harnser Systems Ltd, Marigold Gloves, Comsec, Bratts Ladders, Euro Towers Ltd, GSS Group Ltd, Impacto Protective, North Safety Products, UCATT Training, TufWork and Safety Wear Ltd, Brunner Mond, Degrees of Risk, British Safety Council and Arden Winch.
