Getting people home safe in the green transition

The drive to decarbonise the UK’s energy supply is fuelling exponential growth in the installation and operation of power generation that does not depend on fossil fuels. This expansion saw electricity generation from renewable sources pass 50 per cent of total supply in the UK in 2023.

Photograph: SSE

For the businesses enabling this transfer to low-carbon renewable energy the challenges of protecting the workers they depend on are many, and they increase with the volume of demand. Building and installing low-carbon energy generation combines elements of the occupational health and safety risk profiles of manufacturing, construction and civil engineering. Much of the work, such as transporting, commissioning and maintaining wind turbines and solar farms, happens remotely, where supervision may be harder to guarantee.

The planned use of larger batteries to provide local continuity to compensate for the intermittency of some natural energy sources brings increased fire risk. Installation and maintenance of wind arrays presents an unusual mix of safety challenges, including confined spaces, work at height and electrical hazards, often over water. Though none of the renewable technologies – from solar and thermal energy to wind and hydrogen power – throws up completely fresh risks, it is these new combinations and unusual locations that change the risk profile.

For these reasons, the organisations shaping the future of clean power generation have to be able to forge strong safety cultures to protect the 38 million people who will be employed to provide renewable energy by 2030, according to a forecast by the International Renewable Energy Agency. Culture is often summarised as what people do when there is no one watching, so a sound safety culture involves employees internalising the importance of avoiding unnecessary risk taking and watching out for themselves and colleagues.

Good PPE (personal protective equipment) provision, task-specific training and strongly enforced life-saving rules for major hazards have reduced incidents dramatically over the years, but the downward curve has levelled off in many organisations. The emphasis on safety culture and behaviour in most industries in recent years reflects the belief that we can only achieve the lowest levels of harm if workers are convinced that safety is everyone’s responsibility.

A case in point

UK energy company SSE is one of the companies dealing with the challenges of powering the energy revolution without compromising worker safety. We are at the forefront of boosting renewable energy flow, by developing, building and operating onshore and offshore wind farms, hydro power, flexible thermal generation and electricity transmission and distribution networks. Our Net Zero Acceleration Plan Plus (NZAP Plus) has earmarked £20.5 billion of capital expenditure over the next five years – 90 per cent of it dedicated to renewables and to the network that transmits the power generated. The business is growing fast; we are adding around 1,000 people a year to our 13,000 strong workforce.

In SSE’s safety team we have spent seven years building a safety culture built on personal responsibility. Our messaging to employees has promoted the idea of everyone being part of a ‘Safety Family’ and has couched all messaging in the third person plural to emphasise this. Examples are: “We say, sort, report it” and “We plan, scan and adapt.” All these flow from our central principle, which we call our safety licence: “If it’s not safe, we don’t do it”. 

Because our employees have a strong sense of serving the communities whose lights they keep on, our work to reinforce the Safety Family theme also draws on that sense of belonging. We talk about community in terms of a common sense of purpose, and unity, people pulling together. Those two words combine to make community.

The messaging has been backed up by behavioural training for key groups in the workforce. We have run a day-long Empowering Supervisors course, for example, which aims to equip all frontline leaders with the behavioural insights and communication tools to positively influence safe work and wellbeing among their teams.

The Safety Family campaign has been successful in driving down incident rates, cutting serious incidents by two-thirds, but at a time of rapid expansion there is inevitably an increase in our risk levels; new recruits take time to learn the procedures for working safely and to internalise the culture.

The new people bring us their skills, knowledge and experience. We want to benefit from those while maintaining our safety culture, based on the idea of getting everyone home safe.

As well as our direct employees, we also need to protect up to 50,000 contractor staff working on our behalf. There has been a tick-up in accident rates among contract staff in the past two years and like many companies with a mature approach to occupational safety and health, we do not draw a line between direct and contract staff where accidents are concerned. We feel it when our contract partners do not get home safe and it’s a major driver for us to strengthen the safety culture. But more generally, the biggest players in the energy field, such as SSE, can make an impact throughout the industry if we bring the smaller organisations in our supply chains up to our standards.

So, we make real efforts to extend our safety culture to contractors, to influence them and help raise standards throughout the industry. In autumn 2024 we held our second group partner SHE event in Glasgow – with around 145 supply chain companies, almost a third more than the year before. The day included presentations on the importance of good health and wellbeing and a panel on modern slavery, with partners encouraged to share their strategies and thoughts.

Photograph: SSE 

The yearly events are just one strand in a system of engagement, driven by a dedicated team, that includes electronic bulletins and a partner portal for companies to access all our safety materials. This work is having a positive effect. In our fiscal year 2023-2024 our contractor injuries were 3.3 times higher than our direct employees. Between April and October 2024, the proportion had more than halved to 1.4 times.

The biggest initiative we have made to unify our safety provisions for direct and indirect workers is our day-long immersive safety training which 7,000 SSE colleagues and 700 contractor employees have so far attended.

Immersive training

​While looking for something to move the dial in safety culture, we became aware of a new training initiative developed for employees working on the Thames Tideway ‘super sewer’ project in London. The training was developed by Active Training Team (ATT), an organisation that combines drama with proven learning methods to explore behaviour. We were impressed by the way the day-long Tideway session plunged trainees into the experience of witnessing a workplace incident involving serious harm and how it made them internalise the need to protect themselves and others.

Once we decided this was the intervention needed to reinforce our safety culture, we committed to developing a version of the training for our direct workforce and contractors at a cost of £2.5 million. Our SHE team spent time with ATT ensuring that the scenarios and messaging aligned with SSE’s safety culture and supported our Safety Family approach. The elaborate sets we needed for the immersive training were built at our existing training centre on the outskirts of our hometown base of Perth in Scotland.

Small groups of our attendees start our immersive training day sipping coffee in a dockside site canteen setting. They are joined by two operatives of a fictional renewables company, Selnaco, discussing their aches and pains, fatigue and concerns about an upcoming job lifting gas cylinders on to a jack-up barge. Later, the participants witness an incident which results in the death of one of the operatives. State-of-the-art multi-media heightens the sensory experience. They explore the narrative through a series of scenes observing the behaviours and the decisions that lead to the fatality. We dive into the impact of the incident on the dead worker’s family and colleagues, the police investigation and the ramifications for Selnaco and its contractors and clients.

The quality of the acting and the realism of the dialogue and scenarios pack a real punch and have a powerful effect on an observer. If it makes people feel uncomfortable, that’s not a bad thing if it makes them think differently about keeping other people safe.

But the shock value of witnessing an incident is not enough; the training has to give everyone who goes through it the tools to potentially head off such incidents in their own work settings.

So, in the afternoon, there are a series of Practical Safety Leadership workshops which explore the critical role of communication in workplace safety. Participants learn techniques to successfully challenge unsafe behaviour and speak up about risky conditions with confidence, but without being confrontational. They develop a new understanding of the impact of their own behaviour and how we can accept challenge graciously. Participants are then able to practice these skills, guiding the characters they encountered earlier towards behaviour which leads to a preferred outcome.

The overall message is that safety is not something that is imposed from outside. Everyone is responsible for their own safety and that of their colleagues and everyone is a leader when it comes to health and safety.

We launched the training in mid-April 2024. More than 7,000 people have been through the centre to date and we expect to put 7,000 people through the course there every year.

Sustainable impact

Our immersive training has had the impact we hoped for on attendees’ perceptions of their safety roles. The proportion that strongly agreed they felt confident to challenge unsafe behaviour had increased from 43 per cent to 68 per cent, and 95 per cent agreed overall.

Most importantly, it should have a lasting impact on their behaviour, since that is how the safety culture is sustained. As the renewable energy industry continues to grow, to provide the sources we need to power a cleaner future and limit global temperature rise, this focus on encouraging and enabling safe behaviour will be key to managing the new hazard profiles that come with it across our industry and making sure everyone goes home safe.

Mark Patterson is group safety, health and environment (SHE) director at SSE.

For more information see:

sse.com