The Challenge
Network Rail owns and operates the UK’s railway infrastructure, with a mission to provide a safe, reliable and efficient railway fit for the 21st century. More than 100,000 track workers maintain 20,000 miles of track, so safety is paramount at Network Rail. With daily safety briefings held at hundreds of depots every day and a multitude of health and safety messages across the organisation, the challenge was to engage workers without overwhelming them with a barrage of information ‘from HQ’ that could easily be seen as irrelevant and dangerously ignored.
The Brief
Aqueduct was briefed to create a way of centrally managing all safety messages, unite them under a single brand and to plan and promote key safety campaigns for 22,000 maintenance staff, 90,000 contractors, 14,000 corporate employees and all safety critical workers. The brief also called for planning and measurement of a long term campaign in order to achieve meaningful behaviour change.
The Design Simple, visual messages have been created within a co-ordinated campaign, Safety 365, addressing general sources of safety risk as well as a family of sub-campaigns dealing with sets of issues including slips, trips and falls, manual handling, the wearing of Personal Protective Equipment, drugs and alcohol and safe driving. Using a mix of media including posters, booklets and films as well as hard hats, water bottles and six branded safety trucks, the campaign uses fluorescent colours, stencilled type and a ‘battered and bruised believability’ to make the tone, style and language of the campaign relevant for its audience.
The Results Since the campaign’s launch in March 2005, there have been no fatalities among Network Rail track workers. In the ten years preceeding the campaign there had been over 30 fatalities on the UK’s tracks. Among the maintenance workforce 80% of staff recall seeing each of the Safety 365 campaigns. More than 70% of staff feel that safety communications have changed the way they think about safety and 74% of safety briefers feel safety issues are better communicated than two years ago. Now, 92% of staff say that they are responsible for performing their job safely.
Judges Comments An ‘inspiring’ project with ‘entirely admirable objectives delivered with humour’ said the panel, who emphasised the ‘enormous standout’, ‘individual design’ and ‘great use of media mix’. ‘It’s important to get the safety message across and they really are,’ said Lord Karan Bilimoria, CEO of Cobra Beer. ‘It’s a very strong safety message and very well done.’
