Health & Safety
Our commitment to protecting our employees is recognised throughout the industry.
Speak to an expert >As a leader in specialist marine surface treatments, we aim to collaborate with our partners and clients to promote best practice thinking across the maritime supply chain, so that safety standards are implemented consistently for the benefit of everyone involved in our operations.
We ensure our people are exposed to as minimal risk as possible across all our marine activities, from ship deck painting and anti-skid applications to pontoon and linkspan resurfacing in complex port and harbour environments. We are equally committed to supporting our team in managing their work-life commitments without compromising their health, safety and wellbeing. Improving safety is a collaborative exercise, so we encourage open communication with others and actively share lessons learnt across our business.
As a business we have significantly improved safety through redesigning and refining our specialist marine equipment, providing enhanced PPE appropriate to the unique demands of marine working environments, extensive operator training and a range of other targeted safety initiatives.
Cultural change
For many years, as part of the wider WJ Group, we have been developing a safety and wellbeing culture throughout our entire business with care, investment, determination and innovation, whilst also fostering a strong sense of community among our teams. We challenged ourselves to find better and safer ways of working by radically changing our thinking, empowering our people and influencing behaviours at every level, including in the demanding and variable conditions that marine project work can present.
The hard work invested has provided ground-breaking outcomes, including innovations developed in collaboration and shared across the industry. Our people have been introduced to why we think and act in the way we do by leading psychologists, and a mock trial had a significant impact by highlighting the potential consequences of unsafe behaviour on and around marine structures. This journey has continued with our training provider, who is supporting us through a multi-year programme to develop our people and further the cultural change that is delivering better outcomes for our group and the clients we serve.
Driver Behaviour Scheme
We have implemented a Driver Behaviour scheme that analyses the behaviour of those operating our vehicles and marine support fleet, and incentivises them to act safely, both for their own wellbeing and that of other road and site users. Since its implementation, this has resulted in a 40% reduction in the number of accidents and a 44.87% decrease in the associated annual costs.
Mental Health First Aiders
Throughout the WJ Group we have over 30 Mental Health First Aiders and more than 150 people who have completed red flag training. This is further supported by our employee assistance programme, which our people can use to access private, independent support whenever they need it. We understand that working in marine environments, often on vessels, at height or in confined dockside spaces, brings additional pressures, and we take seriously our responsibility to support the mental as well as physical wellbeing of our teams.
Innovative Vehicle Design
By owning our own engineering facilities we are able to continuously improve our vehicles with every iteration to implement additional safety features. We use the feedback from our SOS system and other means to develop new features and ensure our vehicles are as safe as they can be.