In the last instalment of our Industry 5.0 blog series, we hear from our Compliance Manager, Alan Caddies:
A key part of Industry 5.0 is recognising and embracing the important role culture plays in business practice. When I started my career over 30 years ago, the topics of Health and Safety and Sustainability were nothing like they are today. With minimal standards and regulations, no sustainability goals set and a small-picture mindset, the challenges that fall within these subjects were seen to be the role of one person within the workplace, and most often viewed as a barrier to getting work done. Now, Health and Safety and Sustainability are arguably amongst the most recognisable examples of an organisation’s culture, and this is certainly the case for Booth Welsh.
A Culture of Safety & Sustainability
We believe safety performance is not just one person or department’s job; it’s something everyone is empowered to enact as part of their daily working lives and embedding safety into our culture is an essential principle of Industry 5.0. By making this essential mindset shift, we have achieved a significant milestone of 18 years without a Lost Time Incident (LTI) – an outstanding testament to our commitment to safety, and pleasingly coincides with my own 18 years within the business!
In recent years, we have seen a shift in the adoption of sustainable practices, embedding them into elements of our projects and our day-to-day. Moving beyond Industry 4.0, we pivoted this concept a few years ago and adapted it to incorporate our people and planet positive values, calling it Environment 4.0. Industry 5.0 builds on our vision of Environment 4.0, emphasising a stronger focus on sustainability, resilience, and human-centric values, creating the positive impacts that benefit our workforce, clients, local communities, and enhances our environmental responsibility.
At the beginning of 2024, we proudly published our first Social Impact Report as a reflection of the previous year, which you can view here: Booth Welsh Impact Report 2023
We have bold ambitions for sustainable growth in 2025 for both our business and the clients we serve. Full details of our continued sustainability efforts and our future plans will be outlined in our latest Impact Report for 2024-2025 which will be published in the coming weeks.
Collaboration for Positive Change
In-house collaboration has been enhanced thorough the creation of our Net Zero Heroes team which brings members of our workforce together from across the business to collectively review our sustainability strategy and develop plans, actions and outcomes that further embed sustainability across the business.
“I joined the NZH because I had previously been involved in other ventures to do with sustainability and environmental impact, mainly Fuel Change. After my involvement in that, I realised how vital it is for people to reflect on their impact on the environment, not just at work, but in their own personal lives too. Our mission as the NZH team is to continually seek to improve how sustainable we are as a business, and accurately report our results for people to understand how anything can make a difference.” – Megan Coupar, Business & Administration Assistant
It has been deeply rewarding to see our team embrace sustainability, and continuing to make positive mindset changes and actions, embedding better practices into our operations and turning them into impactful solutions for both our business and our clients.
A Safe Pair of Hands
Discipline across our operations has served the business well, and was enhanced in 2000 when we achieved certification to ISO 9001, the first of four international management standards which now includes ISO 14001, ISO 27001 and ISO 45001. Across these standards, we have continuously achieved good externally measured audit performance, aided by well implemented and robust processes and procedures, and shored up by our culture led approach.
Our safety and compliance performance positions the business in a way that our clients can consider us to be a ‘safe pair of hands’ in a marketplace that is evolving
beyond just fiscal value, to one where ethical, moral and sustainable practices are emerging ever-more as the tangible drivers for decision making considerations.
Community
Another example of Industry 5.0 are the benefits we aim to create within the local community. Our mission statement “Through collaboration, we engineer a better future” was developed through the communal spirit of our teams from across all sectors of the business, who embraced the collective initiative derived from the strong workplace culture that already existed within the business, clearly aligning with the principles of Industry 5.0 before it was even a concept.
By embracing collaboration that creates greater impact through the sharing of best practices is something has opened doors to opportunity. An example of this is recently hosting a yearlong Net Zero Accelerator program in partnership with North Ayrshire Council and local company Ailsa Reliability Solutions, mentoring and helping 14 local North Ayrshire companies to ‘graduate’ and produce their first carbon reduction plans, measuring their carbon footprints and bring almost 80,000 tons of local Co2 emissions under a programme of reduction management.
Looking Ahead
The Net Zero Heroes team are now assessing the sustainability readiness of our supply chain and signposting education programmes that will help our suppliers engage with measurement of their emissions and create their own carbon reduction plans, which has the overall benefit of helping us to establish sustainable procurement in our supply chain going forward.
By driving safety and sustainability across our workforce in many forms, we are providing a working environment that is future-fit, resilient and attractive. Industry 5.0 certainly features heavily in the way we operate and do business right now, and it positions us well for whatever the future might throw at us. By embracing Industry 5.0 principles, we are meeting today’s demands and engineering a better future for us all.