The Challenge

The City of London Corporation faced a unique challenge in safety management due to its diverse organisational complexity. With approximately 4,000 employees spread across 18 highly diverse departments, the Corporation’s activities range from policing to education, arts and culture, environmental services, and forestry operations.

When Oliver Sanandres joined the organisation, he encountered a critical knowledge gap: “The question I really wanted answered is where is everyone from a safety perspective? I wanted to see what was in the departments and how they were managing health and safety, but there was a dearth of information.”

Traditional audit approaches would have been too time-consuming for the new safety team working within tight timeframes. Furthermore, the organization’s extreme diversity presented a formidable challenge:

“It’s a very geographically spread organization doing an incredible amount of varied stuff. The risk profile covers pretty much every gambit. Outside of manufacturing, we pretty much do it all.”

This diversity created particular difficulties in understanding:

1. Where safety ownership truly resided within each department
2. The actual effectiveness of safety systems rather than just their existence
3. How to establish appropriate improvement priorities across such varied operations

Oliver needed a solution that could rapidly assess safety maturity across this complex landscape, providing actionable insights to drive meaningful improvements.

Impact Made

The implementation of Safe365 across the City of London Corporation has delivered significant benefits:

Clear Visibility of Safety Maturity

Safe365 provided unprecedented visibility across this complex organization:

“We were able to give a very assured view to our members and to the leaders in each department as to where the gaps were. From my point of view, I could then use those gaps to start deploying elements that would close those gaps.”

This clarity led to concrete actions, including:

• Reviewing the safety management framework at a corporate level
• Identifying the need for leadership-specific safety training
• Developing tailored programs instead of generic external courses

Data-Driven Resource Allocation

Safe365’s insights enabled evidence-based conversations about resource needs:

“The data being there allowed me to position those conversations and use data to rationalize why we needed what we did, and that was really powerful.”

This approach transformed traditionally difficult conversations about safety resources into objective discussions based on demonstrated needs.

Leadership Engagement and Ownership

Safe365 helped shift the perception of safety from a compliance exercise to a leadership responsibility:

“In terms of the directors, generally they all love it because they could see all of a sudden where their gaps were. But not just where their gaps were, they could see clearly where and in what part of the system their gaps were.”

The assessment process itself, involving various stakeholders from leaders to frontline workers, helped build organizational buy-in:

“Once they all saw the process happening and unfolding, and particularly the unique way that the assessment profile is done with a variation of different people from across the organization from leaders to coalface workers, I think they were all won over.”

Practical, Actionable Guidance

Safe365’s approach made safety improvement accessible even to non-specialists:

“I literally had one operational leader who manages a very prominent landmark in London who, after I broke down the results of his first assessment, literally stood up and gave me a hug and said ‘I can manage this, I now know clearly where to go with this.’ The tool provides you with almost like a color-by-numbers approach for safety. You answer the question and then you do what the question tells you. The system then supports you with templates and everything else.”