How the City of London reframed safety as a vital part of management leadership
City of London
“The question I really wanted answered is where is everyone from a safety perspective? I wanted to see what was in the departments and how they were managing health and safety, but there was a dearth of information.”
Oliver Sanandres, Director of Health and Safety, City of London
The Challenge
Unpacking the current state of play across a diverse company landscape to inform a new safety strategy.
The City of London Corporation faced a unique challenge in safety management due to its diverse organisational complexity. With approximately 4,000 employees spread across 18 highly diverse departments, the Corporation’s activities range from policing to education, arts and culture, environmental services, and forestry operations.
Traditional audit approaches would have been too time consuming for the new safety team working within tight timeframes. Furthermore, the organisation’s extreme diversity presented a formidable challenge:
This diversity created particular difficulties in understanding:
- Where safety ownership truly resided within each department
- The actual effectiveness of safety systems rather than just their existence
- How to establish appropriate improvement priorities across such varied operations
City of London needed a solution that could rapidly assess safety maturity across this complex landscape, providing actionable insights to drive meaningful improvements.
“It’s a very geographically spread organisation doing an incredible amount of varied stuff. The risk profile covers pretty much every gambit. Outside of manufacturing, we pretty much do it all.”
The Solution: A systematic approach to visualise and improve safety across its diverse operations
Phase 1: Customised Assessment Framework
Despite having 18 departments, the team identified the need for 44 distinct Safe365 profiles to capture the organisation’s. complexity adequately. This approach enabled them to
- Conduct targeted deep dives into high-risk operations
- Gain clear visibility of the entire organisation
- Help the relatively new safety team understand the full scope of operations
Phase 2: Rapid, Comprehensive Assessments
Safe365’s assessment methodology provided unprecedented efficiency. The assessments revealed three critical levels of safety management
- Systems that existed on paper
- Systems that existed and were working
- Systems that existed but weren’t working, with no awareness of their ineffectiveness
Phase 3: Data-Driven Leadership Engagement
Safe365’s visual dashboard became a powerful tool for educating and engaging leaders across the organisation:
- “When you want to start influencing groups to understand the effectiveness of managing safety, the tool became really useful to paint a picture of what we know as a management system and why it’s important to manage safety within that system. Given it’s so clearly in the output from the dashboard, you can quite clearly have those conversations visually.”This visualisation helped transform safety from a compliance exercise to a leadership responsibility:“We are wanting to have the conversation with the corporation around framing safety as a leadership component of management. And ultimately that’s the conversation that we are now starting to have and starting to manage quite clearly using the data with backup.”
Phase 4: Continuous Improvement Framework
Safe365 established a framework for sustainable improvement rather than periodic compliance checks:
“With Safe365, because it’s there, it’s ever-present, you are expected to jump into that tool day in, week in, month in, however you want to do it, and demonstrate how you’ve improved. The system really gives you that ability to bring in that discipline around incorporating safety as part of your management.”
The Results:
Data-Driven Safety Leadership and Accountability in Action
Safe365 provided unprecedented visibility across this complex organisation:
This clarity led to concrete actions, including:
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- Developing tailored programs instead of generic external courses
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- Identifying the need for leadership-specific safety training
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- Reviewing the safety management framework at a corporate level
“We were able to give a very assured view to our members and to the leaders in each department as to where the gaps were. From my point of view, I could then use those gaps to start deploying elements that would close those gaps.””
Leadership Engagement and Ownership
Safe365 helped shift the perception of safety from a compliance exercise to a leadership responsibility:
The assessment process itself, involving various stakeholders from leaders to frontline workers, helped build organisational buy-in:
“Once they all saw the process happening and unfolding, and particularly the unique way that the assessment profile is done with a variation of different people from across the organisation from leaders to coalface workers, I think they were all won over.”
Data-Driven Resource Allocation
Safe365’s insights enabled evidence-based conversations about resource needs:
This approach transformed traditionally difficult conversations about safety resources into objective discussions based on demonstrated needs.
“The data being there allowed me to position those conversations and use data to rationalise why we needed what we did, and that was really powerful.
Practical, Actionable Guidance
Safe365’s approach made safety improvement accessible even to non-specialists:
“I literally had one operational leader who manages a very prominent landmark in London who, after I broke down the results of his first assessment, literally stood up and gave me a hug and said ‘I can manage this, I now know clearly where to go with this.’ The tool provides you with almost like a colour-by-numbers approach for safety. You answer the question and then you do what the question tells you. The system then supports you with templates and everything else.”
“For me, Safe365, it’s almost like my go-to. It really has become a powerful part of my arsenal as a safety professional and I’ve tried to deploy it everywhere I’ve been since. It gives you such an edge.”
Oliver Sanandres, Director of Health and Safety, City of London
What this means for your Public Service organisations?
Based on his experience with Safe365 at both the City of London Corporation and previously at Auckland Council in New Zealand, Oliver identified three key benefits the platform offers to public sector organisations:
Resource Maximisation
“It maximises your resource. We are not well-resourced as a health and safety function typically across the public sector. Safe365 gives you enormous reach and power into departments.”
Clear Improvement Roadmaps
It gives you very clear plans of improvement and actually enables you to transfer that knowledge over to those owners who own risk. It’s not health and safety people who own risk, it’s the leaders of those services and departments who own risk. They need to manage health and safety, not us. Safe365 enables us to do that transfer and hold them to account.”
Simplified Path to Excellence
“It offers a feeling of light at the end of the tunnel. It is actually really simple. I’ve had these conversations with directors with the data in front of me to say ‘Look, this is how easy it is.’ That simplicity and that light at the end of the tunnel to be able to do stuff is what Safe365 gives.”
Oliver firmly believes Safe365 can help transform safety management across the public sector.
Ready to Transform Your Safety Culture?
Public or Private sector continuous improvement in safety requires the entire organisation to understand what, why and how.
