Originally published by the Australian Institute of Health & Safety
Ross Taylor, former CEO of Fletcher Building, won the Australian WHS Champion (CEO) of the Year (more than 1000 employees) in the Australian Workplace Health & Safety Awards for driving a significant positive shift in workplace safety performance
Ross Taylor is the former CEO of Fletcher Building, a significant product manufacturer, retailer, home builder and partner on major construction and infrastructure projects across Australia and New Zealand. Taylor led Fletcher Building from 2017 to 2024 and previously served as CEO of international engineering business UGL; CEO of engineering and construction services company Tenix and held senior leadership roles at Lendlease across a 23-year period.}
In the summer of 2018/2019, Fletcher Building Group experienced five fatalities in three months across two divisions. Taylor made it his personal mission to ‘leave no stone unturned’ and fully transform the culture of the organisation, which employs thousands of people across Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific. In five years, during his term as CEO, Taylor successfully transformed the culture and helped deliver an 86 per cent reduction in serious injuries (down to nearly zero from an average of 25 or 30 serious injuries per year prior to his arrival), as well as a 47 per cent reduction in total injuries.
Taylor did this through a relentless focus on leadership accountability for performance and through a caring culture, focused on engaging hearts and minds with the belief that all injuries can be prevented. A common catchphrase for Taylor is “great safety is great business”. The businesses that prioritise the best safety outcomes in Fletcher Building are the same businesses that retain top-quartile people engagement (eNPS), great customer engagement (NPS), are performing well financially and are making good progress in their sustainability ambitions. In FY23, the business achieved its best-ever financial performance as well as its fewest injuries on record.
Three years ago, 53 per cent of people in the business reported that “my immediate supervisor/manager takes responsibility for leading safety”; now 90-plus per cent agree that leaders demonstrate day-to-day action on safety.
Re-establishing the role of operational ‘line’ leadership from the top including Board and senior executive teams, and general management needed to be the engine-room for meaningful change in safety culture right across the organisation.
Together with the Safety, Health, Environment and Sustainability (SHES) Committee and with Taylor’s advocacy, the Board built new key performance metrics into leaders’ long-term (LTI) and short-term (STI) incentive schemes.
This would apply a set number of leader walks to each period, specific TRIFR and risk-containment targets for operational line leaders and for functional executives, measures of safety influence and create a pathway for lead measures to be integrated in the future.
The business’s core value of safety has four key behaviours associated with it: ‘we believe all injuries are preventable’; ‘we never walk past – we speak up and take action’; ‘we celebrate the good stuff’, and ‘we care for each other’. In 2024, 90 per cent of the 14,900 employees identify with the statement ‘we believe all injuries are preventable’ (up from 42 per cent in 2019).
In a first for Fletcher Building, Taylor appointed a Chief Health and Safety Officer, reporting directly to him and tasked with driving the ambitious programme characterised by.
1. Accountability. Taylor started the journey by engaging with 150-plus business leaders and set the tone. Every leader involved in the fatalities had to front the room to share the impact of the events. Each leader needed to reset with that same sense of ‘chronic unease’ and treat every high potential event like the real thing.
2. Mindset and values. Taylor and the executive then reset the values of the organisation – placing “protect” at the heart of everything the business would do moving forward.
3. Leadership. The next step was to develop operational leaders to become passionate and accountable safety leaders, connecting with a personal ‘why’.
4. Frontline. Frontline workers were provided with an equivalent programme for the frontline called ‘Power Up’ with the same leadership messages in fun, gamified toolboxes.
5. Critical risks. Core life-saving rules were reset with frontline teams and leaders were equipped with new tool, “risk containment”, to sweep for and contain dangerous risks. Later, leaders agreed a set of 21 critical risks and associated critical controls and set about verifying that these were in place.
More than 3000 line-leaders have completed the Safety Leadership Programme, with individuals’ line-managers leading the learning, complemented by follow-up with extensive coaching and review. The content and format for the programme was critical, with two days of reflection, storytelling, and workshops followed by three to six months of coaching. The programme is designed to develop confident leaders and modules include ‘leading self’; ‘leading the team’ and ‘leading our way’. The programme soon came to be understood not as ‘safety training’, but rather as leadership training, with a safety focus, and more than 30,000 hours of frontline Power Up sessions have been completed as well.
Taylor understood that building belief and establishing a widespread culture of care would spark meaningful change. The first step Taylor and the steering group made for the entire organisation was to send a strong message about the importance of safety for the organisation as more than a set of standard operating procedures.
“Protect” became a core company value. To kick it off with appropriate leadership buy-in, Taylor hosted an intensive half-day conference with 200-plus senior leaders to reset “Protect” as a value. This session was followed up in subsequent activities to create a domino effect for safety vision through storytelling and workshop the specific behaviours that would evidence the change the group were collectively seeking.
As a result of Taylor’s leadership and these initiatives, 18 of 25 of businesses in the group achieve zero recordable injuries in any given month. In the first half of 2024, 94 per cent of 800+ sites achieved zero injuries. In FY23, in the first months since their implementation, the company verified over 4000 critical controls and contained 700 high-severity risks. As a result, the Total Recordable Injury Frequency Rate (TRIFR) has reduced from 5.2 in FY19 to TRIFR of 3.1 in FY23 (a 47 per cent reduction).
