Guinness Partnership

The Guinness Partnership was founded in 1890 and offers homes for rent, affordable home ownership options and homes that people can purchase outright on the open market. They have built and managed thousands of homes across England and today look after over 120,000 customers, operating in 125 local authority areas across England

The Guinness Partnership and 3B

3B Training has been a supplier of health and safety training to The Guinness Partnership for some years, providing public, eLearning and in-house courses covering the general training needs of the business.

As the relationship developed and The Guinness Partnership’s training needs changed, and 3B Training were awarded a contract to provide more bespoke health and safety training. They worked with maintenance and construction teams to improve overall health and safety awareness and to upskill in areas of high risk.

3B Training are now working in a more collaborative way with the Learning and Development Team to ensure the training provided is relevant and engaging, and to reduce risk and incidents across The Guinness Partnership’s business.

Changing needs

3B Training has been providing training to the Guinness Partnership on an ad hoc basis, with their Learning and Development Team booking training where required as operatives joined, or when new work was commissioned.

There wasn’t a formal contract in place and the Guinness Partnership team were buying off the shelf training courses, mostly delivered through eLearning or in-house at their locations or sites. Whilst this was sufficient in delivering to need, it didn’t allow for any collaborative response to business issues and wasn’t tailored to specific needs around different projects or to different delegates knowledge and skills.

The Guinness Partnership team began reviewing health and safety training provision and highlighted a need for bespoke training in an area of the business where the training needs were critical to improve safety. This, alongside the business taking on new projects and expanding its output, brought about a need to fill a gap in the training of site managers and health and safety training for operatives.

A collaborative approach

3B Training’s Managing Director, Mat Bewley, sat down with The Guinness Partnership’s Learning and Development Team and discussed the issues they faced, the current level of training, and what they felt was needed to solve the problems of a skills gap within the construction teams.

Mat was able to suggest an approach that would be more cost effective and provide training bespoke to their needs with a mix of CITB SMSTS and SSSTS for site managers and supervisors, and Basic Scaffold Awareness, Asbestos Awareness and Health and Safety Awareness courses for operatives with specific training needs.

This collaborative approach had a big impact in ensuring that 3B fully understood the training needs and were able to build a training package that would fully support the teams involved. In addition to using the budget more efficiently to ensure positive outcomes for all.

Mat said: “It’s important that we work closely with training teams, operatives, and managers in a business like The Guinness Partnership, to bring our expertise around health and safety in construction to bear to find the right outcomes. This collaborative approach enables us to learn more about how the operatives work, what the weak points are and where we can fill training gaps appropriately to have the right impact.”

Impact

Over 200 of The Guinness Partnership’s construction operatives, supervisors and managers have taken a 3B Training course so far, and this has brought a clear impact not just in the overall improvement in health and safety on sites, but also in the engagement the delegates have shown with the training and the benefits it provides for them personally.

Diane Hall, Learning & Development Manager at The Guinness Partnership said: “Working with 3B was really positive, they have a level of expertise that enabled them to understand our needs, and bring solutions to the table that were workable, but also designed with our operatives’ skills in mind. They have provided a training package that is both engaging and impactful.”