News : December 2019
Engaging Our Team
Health and Safety
A core part of engaging our staff is our toolbox talks. Held every six weeks, the toolbox talks feature good food, good company and a opportunity for us to recognise our exceptional staff and talk about issues that are critical to all of us Kerfoot. We want all our team members to go home safe every day, and we’re is always looking for ways to make safety our number one priority, and get team members to think about safety differently. This year at a toolbox talk we hosted Paralympian and workplace safety advocate, Ben Houlison, who became a paraplegic after a workplace accident in 2004. Ben’s amazing story reminded us of the impacts a work injury can have on a worker and their family, something we never want to see anyone go through.
The Kerfoot approach to promoting health and safety is producing results. We were thrilled to see our safety statistics improving, despite the increasing hours worked. Our Lost Time Injury Frequency Rate has reduced by 65% over 12 months, and our Total Recordable Injury Frequency Rate reduced by 30%. That means that Kerfoot is currently tracking at less than half our industry LTIFR! An outstanding achievement by all that demonstrates our commitment to safety.
Mentoring
At Kerfoot, we believe in finding the right person for the right job, helping people connect with your passion and providing team members with support to grow in their careers. It’s entirely possible to have six different vocations while working at Kerfoot! Our mentoring program is gathering pace. The program pairs a team member with a more experienced person to help with goal setting, working to achieve those goals and support career growth.
This year saw the biggest mentoring program participation to date with 34 team members taking part including site-based and office-based team members. The program duration was close to five months, during which the participants frequently met, with mentors assisting their mentees in accomplishing both personal and professional goals and ambitions. The mentoring program embodies our values of nurturing ambition, respect, and positivity.
Kerfoot team-building day
People may forget what you say, they may forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel!
This is the idea behind our Kerfoot whole company days where everyone downs tools to come together as a whole company to build teams and overcome a few set challenges. At Kerfoot we’re so proud of our team and how each and every one of us is extremely passionate about delivering quality work for our clients. Our team off-site days are about adding value: to ourselves and to our clients. This year’s off-site day involved everything from puzzle challenges to a mini-Olympics, and as always, a healthy lunch was provided.
Kerfoot family park brunch
We recognise the hard work of our team members and we also value the ‘teams’ behind our people: the families. To show we value their support, particularly when we’re working on major projects with tight deadlines, we hold an annual park brunch for staff and their families. It’s also a chance for the Kerfoot family to meet other families in each of our lives. The 2019 park brunch was another hit, complete with children’s entertainment, from games through to face painting. There we a lot of dinosaurs and butterflies running around the park on the day and all the kids had a fantastic day, topped off with their very own surprise goodie bags.
National Tradies Month
August was National Tradies Health Month and to show support for the health and wellbeing of the tradies in the Kerfoot family, we kicked off the month by providing 50kg of organic fruit at our mid-year toolbox talk. Team members could grab a bag of fruit for work and take some home for their lunches.
The idea was so well received that we started sending boxes of fruit out to sites to encourage healthy eating. In August alone we delivered 12 boxes of fruit in total to sites. Between the fruit provided at the toolbox, fruit delivered to sites and fruit for the office we supplied a whopping 131kgs of fruit during the month of August. This includes:
- 40kgs of Apples
- 33kgs of Bananas
- 25kgs of Oranges
- 33kgs of Mandarins
Kerfoot also created a competition for all employees on site to send in their healthy
lunch pics to go in the draw to win a Doorstep Organics Fruit & Veggie box as well as a Pete Evans ‘Lunchbox’ cookbook. We had so many great entries we ended up giving away 22 boxes of Doorstep Organics goodies!
