Rail Safety Week 2025 with Head of HSQE, Kevin Griffiths
Celebrating Rail Safety Week 2025 (June 16th-22nd), our Head of HSQE, Kevin Griffiths, offers his thoughts on what makes successful safety leadership. Lowery have achieved 15 consecutive periods 0.0AFR whilst working in dangerous High-Voltage environments.
Can you tell us a bit about your own Safety journey?
I came to Lowery around 20 years ago from an assurance role in manufacturing, initially as a safety engineer. When the Head of Department role became available, I applied, knowing I could add a lot of modernising value and that Lowery actively practice internal development and promotion.
The Feel Empowered to Challenge Safety Campaign appears to have been very successful, how did this originate?
Following a near miss – which thankfully saw no harm, yet could have been significant, I saw a pattern that exists across our industry. People weren’t confident in speaking up. Maybe they felt a more senior person knew better, or they didn't want to cause a fuss. It became clear we needed to do more than just write another procedure. We needed to fundamentally change our culture. So, the rule is simple: If anyone raises a concern, we stop. The Lowery board lead, and continue to lead, this expectation.
How does this support overall behavioural safety practices?
It’s ultimately about being human and recognising people are people and meeting them there. Behavioural Safety, when practiced incorrectly, can make people feel like they’re being told-off – as if they were children again – and that can lead to a negative view of safety practices, making people less safe. Better safe system of work-planning means people aren’t overloaded, or don’t slip into the ‘alpha-zone’ auto-pilot state where accidents are more likely to occur. That Lowery has many long-serving persons helps – people want to protect that safety culture and their colleagues with it.
How is technology improving safety practice?
One of my earliest objectives was to make safety paper-free, many of the modern systems we’re familiar with weren’t available then, so the company sponsored bespoke development. Some of this we still use, e.g. our pro-active digital fatigue management platform is still current and adds value to best practice, otherwise we’ve been early adopters of now-industry norm platforms for competency management, business information and analytics. The automated custom reporting and close call/near-miss trend data helps me to provide greater granularity to our clients and partners and to focus on the safety interventions which will have the greatest impact. All whilst keeping it people-focused.
Lowery is celebrating Rail Safety week with a number of themed tool-box talks at project level.
