Buxton Building Contractors have recently developed an innovative employee smartphone app, which has now been listed on the Considerate Constructors Best Practice Hub

We identified a need to communicate important health, safety and environmental information as well as company news, innovations and well-being, often missed with email and traditional methods.

We divided the app into various zones, The My Buxton zone enables employees to book their holidays, review their personal development plans and access their training records.

Employees can obtain 24hr support with our employee assistance programme, this includes legal, financial, medical, family & work related issues. We have links to the 'Mates in Mind' programme and NHS Live Well app.

Within the Safety zone, an accident and incident reporting feature has now been added. Safety alerts are sent to the phone as a push notification. An online asbestos awareness course is available to use as well as a folder for our risk assessments.

Within other zones, our employees can review environmental alerts, access the CCS best practice hub, learn about modern slavery, book our engineer, report IT issues, review our waste figures and contact our supply chain.

We have added some useful tools to help make life a little easier, checking traffic conditions, public transport and weather, there’s even a torch!

We have tried to make the app inclusive and easy to use and have linked our telephone directory, blog and social media pages as well as adding a staff suggestion box to receive employee feedback and buy in.

Utilising the latest available technology and communication tools. Buxton continue to drive and endorse our mantra ‘safety is no accident’.

A respectful, fair and non-discriminatory management approach is needed if the industry is to attract a skilled and well-motivated workforce. In order to help close the industry’s increasing skills shortage, it has to be able to attract the under-represented sections of the working population and address changing demographics. The workforce will generally be more productive and content, if they feel valued, involved and respected. CCS Scheme