Jennifer Becket

Said the following about Chris Savage:

“Chris joined Network Rail High Speed (NRHS) from Orpington DU, where he was a Track Maintenance Engineer and has been on the railway for over a decade. Chris has progressed swiftly through the business starting as an apprentice and rising to his current position of IME (Infrastructure Maintenance Engineer).

Chris has been integral to the changes that have been made to the infrastructure team at NRHS and has helped to write and set many infrastructure policies and procedures – often writing these out of hours so that it does not impede on his daily activities because he recognises the importance of both.

Additionally, Chris has been an integral member for Infrastructure Resilience work and has worked tirelessly and innovatively to ensure that, after a dip in performance, we swiftly returned to international benchmark levels. Through this, not only have we improved performance, but the overall performance, morale and working practices of the teams has greatly improved with much more collaboration and sharing of knowledge, skills and experience.

This has fed into our Let’s Get it Down to Zero campaign, which is a business wide ambition to achieve as many delay free days, weeks and periods as we can. Presently, we have over 125 delay free days since April, which is an outstanding result and Chris has been a real driving force behind this by engaging the frontline teams and proactively developing ways in which we can pre-empt failures and plan work more effectively.

Bringing in expertise from Network Rail, EU and International colleagues, Chris has helped plan the future strategy of maintenance on NRHS, which has allowed us to foresee the next 5-10 years. As a business, this is tantamount to our future success, but also ensures that we are positioning ourselves as well as possible in the market.

All of the above are examples of the great and innovative work that Chris has achieved in the short time that he has been with NRHS (15 months). But what really makes Chris stand out is his tenacious desire to drive the maintenance teams forward through sharing expertise, upskilling staff, and building relationships through all levels of the business. Chris is very well respected across the business, especially with frontline teams, and the executive team who often turn to him for frontline information. Regularly engaging with the frontline teams is extremely important to Chris and is the reason that 1 night each quarter, there is no work scheduled to allow for Frontline Feedback Forums to take place. The forums are designed to bridge the gap between frontline staff and senior management, and enables staff to bring any ideas, concerns, issues to Chris, who then acts as a conduit with the rest of the business and works relentlessly to close the feedback loop.

Chris is the type of person who finds reasons to say yes, he validates the ideas of others and works to develop them into innovative, efficient solutions, all of which has been very well received in not just his own team, but teams across the business“