Shanks Group plc is a multinational waste management company with operations in Belgium, Northern France, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK. The group’s health and safety performance has improved steadily in the past, but slowly.

Backed by a need to increase the pace of improvement and sponsored by the group’s main board Shanks introduced a safety leadership scheme in June 2011. The main components of this scheme include mandatory director site safety visits and employee engagement, health and safety training for all directors and a series of key safety essentials applied evenly across the group. Safety leadership visits to sites by directors are tracked and reported on as key director performance indicator, linked to their remuneration.