Jennifer Becket

Said the following about Tom Morgan:

“Tom has taken ownership of a rising safety concern within the Network Rail High Speed (NRHS) business, manual handling, and led on the development and implementation of a bespoke training initiative to help improve the safe execution of works and activities. This is completely outside of his job requirements of Examination Engineer Manager.

Tom displays safety leadership in all aspects of their work. He is always driving improvement and challenging his colleagues to think of improved safer ways of working. He takes direct accountability for the actions of himself and his team.

Tom used his initiative and spotted that the gap in training and knowledge was not only in the infrastructure team but across the whole business. Considering this, Tom not only rolled out this training to our infrastructure front line staff, but he made the training fully available across the business which included all staff in operations and stations.

He has led on a work task specific manual handling safety training initiative to address a rising trend in manual handling accidents. This is outside of his day-to-day activities and job description. NRHS has seen a significant number of manual handling accidents over a relative short period of time and having worked on a similar initiative in a previous company, Tom wanted to take the opportunity to engage with the whole business on this safety concern.

The training programme required Tom to engage with the supply chain, collaboratively produce a bespoke training programme, based on task specific activities of multi-discipline/functional teams, coordinate the delivery of this training across the whole business and ensure that this was translated into business as usual activity.

To effectively deliver this, Tom displayed great leadership behaviour, engaging multiple teams around this concern and communicated the benefits of what the training will provide. He coordinated the delivery of the training over several months, across different rostered shifts and a significant number of different tasks. The training was developed to ensure it covered all the tasks that a specific team were required to undertake, ensuring that a step change could be made in the way the workforce thought about this risk, making it 100% relevant to their jobs.

Additional, Tom that this new way of thinking about manual handling could be taken forward into business as usual by incorporated follow up reviews and train-the-trainer content within the initiative.

So far feedback of the training is positive, with doubters now believing that this has made their work safer. The expected outcome is that NRHS will see a step change improvement in our safety record for manual handling. This is an excellent example of Network Rail High Speed using our top talent to lead on successful key business initiatives ensuring they are fully embedded and continued across all teams.“