Horizon explores: Health and Safety
Honesty is
the best
safety policy
RSSB member interview
It seems risky, but being open about risk improves safety. Ellie Burrows, Regional MD, Network Rail, explains why.
Ellie Burrows Regional MD, Network Rail
It’s sometimes said that the rail industry is more than tracks, trains and tech—that the people are what make it. Network Rail Regional MD Ellie Burrows, who’s also Chair of the System Safety Risk Group (SSRG), couldn’t agree more. For her, creating a culture of openness, where everyone is open about risks and other challenges, will make for a safer, higher performing and more successful industry.
With more than 20 years’ rail industry experience, much of that in senior roles, what have you learnt about effective leadership?
Be openIt’s important to create a culture of openness, honesty and listening in order to understand our organisations and the challenges therein. If we don’t, we fool ourselves into thinking we know what’s going on. Management Consultant Peter Drucker said: ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast.’ This old-school leadership quote is spot on. Without an understanding of our organisation’s culture, we can’t deliver a strategy and create success. Additionally, we must model the type of behaviours we want to see.
Think systemwideRail is a system, and we need to understand—and be open to understanding—how the different parts interact. We can’t work in our little part of the industry and expect to be successful. We need to lead from an industry perspective because every time we move something in rail, something else is affected. Systemwide thinking ensures efficacy in what we do.
Plan and preparePlanning for plausible scenarios and expecting the unexpected, and making sure our organisation does the same, supports a strong organisational culture. It encourages people to want to learn, to look out for issues, and to be open to risks and how to plan against them. This fosters confidence and resilience because we know we’ll be ready when things do go wrong.
Look after yourselfSenior rail leader roles are tough. We must try to look after ourselves, especially our mental health, and understand how to improve and maintain our resilience. That might be through diet and sleep, exercise, or a good work/life balance. I know what works for me, what helps me to deal with challenges when they come. Celebrating successes is crucial, too, because that helps us withstand challenges.
How will those lessons help you, both in your role as Regional MD and Chair of RSSB’s SSRG, as we move into CP7?
As Regional MDWe have three cultural principles within the southern region because we want to create the right environment for success and for our people to thrive:
Listen, learn, and improve.
Keep it simple.
Show you care.
Each principle has a role to play as we move into CP7. Take the first. We are creating an environment where people are listening, learning and improving and can hold leadership to account, so we’re doing that, too. To develop a clear vision and strategy, and to be able to challenge it as we move forward, we need to do this.
Then, simplification. In CP7, we must do more of some things and less of others. We need to understand the outcomes of this change—the risks that might arise, and how to mitigate them, as well as any new opportunities that’ll emerge. Preparing for this is vital, too, so working through scenarios and thinking through risks are a must. That calls for a pre-incident investigation mindset, as it’s easier to discuss, understand and mitigate challenges before something has happened. That’s certainly the culture I want to take into CP7.
Everyone in the industry has been through a lot, with Covid, passenger number changes, and industry upheaval over the past few years. So, looking after myself and my team has been one of my priorities, and it’s key to take that into the next control period. We can’t pour from an empty cup.
As SSRG Chair The Rail Industry Health and Safety Strategy (RIHSS) will be launched in 2024, taking us into CP7. Building on its predecessor, Leading Health and Safety on Britain’s Railway, it challenges industry to think and work systemwide—what I mentioned earlier. RSSB can bring together the different elements of the system to ensure we get the best outcome, making it the right organisation to lead the strategy.
SSRG, meanwhile, is uniquely placed to deliver against the safety element. It governs several cross-industry risk groups, each of which is open, listens, and understands rail and the risks. The shared ethics, experience and expertise means that, as we go through our own refresh, we can formulate the right strategy—one that really helps us to become a safer industry.
What’ll SSRG prioritise from 2024, and why?
From 2024, the work of SSRG and its subgroups will be shaped by the RIHSS, which has been developed with industry to ensure the right activities are prioritised. It’s important that we deliver against it, developing our activities and roadmaps accordingly. We want rail companies to do the same—to understand this risk- and fact-based strategy and how it links to their organisational strategy, and then embed it.
Acutely aware that safety doesn’t stand still, and that there are always growing and emerging risks, we will make sure our finger is on the pulse and will share growing and emerging risks with industry.
Beyond that, I want to see increased awareness of the work being done by SSRG’s subgroups and the tools and information available through them and RSSB. I became Chair almost two years ago, and I’m still amazed by the amount of resources available—things I didn’t know existed, despite being a senior rail leader. Often, when we face challenges, it feels like we’re dealing with them alone. But we’re not; we have lots of support.
What are the safety issues industry should be focusing on? What can industry do to tackle these more effectively?
Each organisation will have a different operating environment and therefore the issues they should focus on will vary significantly. It is absolutely key to understand your organisation’s risk profile. Something RSSB and SSRG does very well is bring the industry risk profile together and build our strategy around this.
If we consider the industry as a whole, we know that some of our key deteriorating trends are around work-related violence, signals passed at danger, overspeeding, stop shorts at stations, objects on the line, the platform-train interface, and some of the challenges we are seeing in relation to extreme weather events.
There are a lot of tools available through RSSB to support industry safety plans to deal with some of these risks, including human factors expertise and learning from incidents. As an industry we need to continue to work together, share this learning, and look at how we remove risk and remove reliance on thin controls against these types of risks.
Managing the southern region, which has some of the busiest rail lines in the country, must’ve taught you a lot about safety. What two lessons should be in other rail leaders’ toolbox?
Create an environment where you can be open and honest about risks and the plans to mitigate them. The more open you are, the more continual improvement you’ll see. I can’t underplay how important this is. I’ve worked in environments where this isn’t the case, where people aren’t open and honest about what’s really happening, and it creates risk.
Show that you care about safety. It’s important that your organisation knows how important it is to you, that you prioritise being safe and protecting your people. So, be visible, fix issues when you see them, and expect your organisation to do the same. Additionally, be prepared to challenge and be challenged.
Lastly, remember that none of us are doing this alone. Rail is a big industry, with lots of organisations tackling similar issues. As an industry, we’re stronger together.
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