Insights
Photo: (Left to right) – David Allen (Regional Facilities Manager (North), LSH), Mark Tredgett (Facilities Manager, LSH)
Mark and David were one of the many nominations from the LSH team, highlighting staff members across the country who’ve been working hard to improve LSH’s H&S processes and practices.
The dynamic duo where awarded the top spot following their exceptional achievement on closing over 1,000 risk assessment actions and their positive approach to health and safety for their North East property portfolio.
Mark, normally based in the LSH Leeds office, moved to the Newcastle office to implement a facilities management (FM) function at the newly acquired ES Group. David joined the project around six months later.
The mixed property portfolio consisted of around seventy properties across the North East of England, ranging from offices to residential and commercial buildings.
FM had not been operated before in many of these properties, so there was a significant challenge to gain buy-in to the LSH way of working, across such a diverse range of buildings and broad array of stakeholders, including internal staff, tenants, clients and contractors.
The scale of the challenge was soon realised when the risk assessments on the property portfolio (undertaken by Alcumus HSE) identified over 1,500 risks of varying degrees of severity.
Undeterred by this, Mark and David set to work on the project. Managing these actions via their Alcumus software platform. They prioritised the most serious high and medium actions and tirelessly worked with all stakeholders to complete the majority of these actions.
Their proactive approach enabled LSH to deliver significant improvements which resulted in a rationalisation of service providers, so they had an approved contractor list, all Alcumus SafeContractor approved. Having comfort that those on site had health and safety procedures/policies in place was very reassuring to clients. Having a smaller contractor list also meant they could set up key performance indicators (KPI’s) and monitor performance against these, as well as budgeting for service charges was a lot easier.
Not only had most of actions been closed, but the tenants - who had a history of poor H&S compliance - are now committed to sticking to the best practice too.
Instrumental to their success David claims was: the support from top down within LSH, who always offered to help them.
The competition judges including Mark Stewart (LSH Associate Director - Property Management, LSH) and Richard Edwards (Business Development Director, Alcumus HSE), believed that both Mark and David’s holistic approach to H&S and stakeholder engagement was an excellent example of best practice.
Judge Mark Stewart said: We had a number of applications / nominations throughout the division which demonstrated how much good Health and Safety work is being done. Mark and David’s efforts shone through with their evidence of dedication, focus and determination for excellence in Health and Safety. Please join us in congratulating Mark and David in receiving this award.
