Our Safety Journey

At Fletcher Building, we believe all injuries are preventable. Our plan is to ensure that every person who works for us, or with us, goes home safely each and every day.

Through our dedicated safety culture programme Protect, we have built a strong collective belief that all injuries are preventable and together we live our values to care for each other. Since Protect became a core business value in 2020, our belief has more than doubled and we have reduced our overall injuries by 50% and reduced serious harm by over 90%.

Our journey to Protect

Our journey to Protect started when we experienced five fatalities in three months in the summer of 2018/2019. We partnered with Dupont Sustainable Solutions (DSS+) to help us understand our current state and reframe how we thought about safety. DSS+ helped set our foundations, using the Dupont Bradley Curve and other tools, and laid the groundwork for Protect.

How we're going

We understand that as a safer business, we are a better business for our people, communities and customers. In the years since we reset our Protect programme, we have cut our recordable injuries by nearly half and reduced our serious injuries down by 90% on our way to zero injuries.

It’s for this reason that our focus remains even as our performance improves.

Protect Culture Maturity ‘Colours’ Framework

Our approach to Protect is built off the foundations of the Bradley Curve and combines leadership, culture and critical risk management to give our businesses a proven approach to transforming their culture, reducing injuries and applying best practice globally. This is our Protect Culture Maturity Framework (or simply, our ‘Colours Framework’).

This framework supports continuous development and growth for businesses, teams and individuals as their safety culture shifts from reactive, at-risk compliance cultures, through to more team-based, interdependent and committed safety cultures. It is non-linear so safety leaders can move their businesses and teams forward (or backward) at any time along the curve to access the right learning and tools as they are ready.

Our target: ‘zero injuries, every day’

Achieving our target ‘zero injuries’ every day is considered highly aspirational by some. But for us, there is no acceptable alternative. Now, more and more of our sites, and even whole Businesses and Divisions, are making this a reality, with long periods maintaining zero recordable injuries, not just zero serious injuries.

And our people support it. Nearly 90% of our people identify with the belief that ‘all injuries are preventable’, and our safety culture engagement score of eNPS 61* is world-leading.

Fletcher Living team members share the reasons they choose to work safely via the ‘Why Boards’ on residential building sites.

How our people experience Protect

Our people experience Protect through three key programmes - the Safety Leadership Programme, Critical Risk Management, and the Power Up Frontline programme.

Critical Risk Management

To carefully manage the safety, health and environmental risks which pose the most potential for serious harm (critical risks), we take a three-pronged approach:

1. Life Saving Rules which everyone must follow and specific to each business.
2. Risk Containment Sweeps to sharpen risk-mindfulness and hunt-out dangers, support people to take fresh eyes to emerging dangers and contain these risks.
3. Critical Control Verifications (CCVs) baseline controls for 21 identified safety, health and environmental critical risks managed across our businesses. The benefit of this lead measure is for our people to have more confidence in the application of critical controls: controls we know will protect our people from serious injury or a fatality. Our Critical Risk Handbook is our leadership guide to our 21 critical risks and our approach to critical risk management.

Environmental Health and Safety publications and policies

* New Zealand Association for Training and Development (NZATD) Awards 2022, Best Leadership Development Programme.