Case Studies

Verus worked with a rapidly growing public transport company operating a range of train, bus, ferry and light rail services globally to develop a bespoke, three-year safety strategy. The overall aim was to take the independently operating business units and incorporate them into one universal strategy to improve safety performance.

The company wanted to reignite safety performance improvements that had plateaued, and bring all existing operations together into a single culture. They also wanted to expand and easily bring this new culture to new operations, businesses and people as they grew.

This project reflected a tendency across the sector for public transport providers to 'bolt on' new operations when new government contracts are won. This can lead to difficulties when a new safety culture and systems are different from those that exist.

Project Goals

• The ability for the various businesses to learn from each other.
• Consistent safety performance across business units.
• Further improvement in safety performance.

Our insight

The client’s patchwork of public transport operations and business units all had vastly different safety cultures and levels of safety performance. As government contracts are generally medium-term (5–10 years), we considered the normal means and timeframes for embedding an improved safety culture might be too lengthy.

The solution

We worked with the client to develop a quicker, more standardised cultural integration process they could follow whenever a new contract was won, and we consulted across the organisation to ensure it could be universally applied. Specific deliverables also included:

• Solutions to quickly and efficiently implement the required changes to ensure the benefits could be realised sooner.
• A tailored three-year strategy to improve the organisation’s overall safety performance.