Raising the “Gold” Bar: 27th Consecutive RoSPA Gold Health & Safety Award

Jacobs has been awarded the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) Patron’s Award for health and safety achievement, recognizing our 27th consecutive RoSPA Gold Health and Safety Award.

Nearly 100 years’ old, RoSPA is at the heart of accident prevention around the world. It’s one of the most prestigious and recognized schemes in the world, with almost 2000 entries every year and a reach of over 7 million employees.

Established in 1956, the RoSPA Health & Safety Awards offer organizations a prime opportunity to benchmark safety performance year on year and ensure consistent performance between sites. They also provide an effective route to demonstrate an ongoing commitment to raising health and safety standards.

This year, nearly 2,000 organizations from 46 countries received awards, however Jacobs was one of only 26 globally to be awarded the Patron’s Award, specially introduced to distinguish organizations achieving more than 25 consecutive Golds.

Julia Small, RoSPA’s Achievements Director, said: “With this award we recognize the best of the best, those organizations that have gone the extra mile, raising the bar for the delivery of safety in the workplace.”

“Winning and retaining the Patron’s Award is such an honor for the entire HSE team here at Jacobs,” said Fiona O’Donnell, Jacobs People and Places Solutions Head of HSE, Europe. “It’s the culmination of hard work and determination, through some really tough times.  But also, it demonstrates our passion to always raise the bar in this space.  We’re all absolutely delighted.”

Never more so than in the last 18 months has Jacobs’ Culture of Caring been so important to our company. Our employees have truly lived our brand promise by challenging today and reinventing tomorrow, embracing and rethinking how we continue to drive the business forward, better supporting our clients, looking out for our colleagues and extending our Culture of Caring into our global communities.

BeyondZero® is our approach to the health, safety and security of our people, the protection of the environment and the resilience of Jacobs. While our BeyondZero journey started with safety, as we continued to drive our injury rates down, we also expanded our thinking to our broader culture of caring and particularly mental health. Building upon our existing Mental Health Matters program’s foundational elements, last year we launched our Mental Health Matters Resiliency program and continued to grow our global network of positive mental health champions and promote our suicide awareness campaign.

We also use innovative approaches to managing risk with the use of Jacobs’ Virtual Event Space, to create personalized and globally accessible events to connect clients and projects to their stakeholders in an online and rich, interactive experience, whilst eliminating the risk to health, safety and the environment associated with traditional events. Our new safety in design program, de5ign, takes us beyond base legislative requirements and provides a consistent approach to safety in design across our global business. BeyondZero by definition, de5ign aims to go beyond the accepted to create high value, safer and healthier solutions for a more connected sustainable world.

Last year, we also launched our One Million Lives check-in tool with website resources. Developed in collaboration with global mental health professionals, One Million Lives is a free mental health check-in tool to enhance users' understanding of their current state of mind and provide proactive strategies for personal mental health development. By regularly completing a check-in via the web-based app, users will ideally be better equipped to understand how they are currently coping, assess the early indicators of associated mental health challenges, start positive and active conversations and get support much earlier.