Job Description

What's the Opportunity
We have an opportunity for a Health and Safety Group Lead to join our team based in Oxford to support the journey and development of a generative H&S Culture. You will contribute to, and be responsible for, the delivery of a cultural roadmap across the national business.
The Health and Safety Group Lead will be responsible for promoting and embedding a positive safety culture within the construction consultancy. This role involves ensuring compliance with health and safety legislation, codes of practice, and company policies, while proactively working with managers and staff to establish and maintain safe systems of work and environments.
The role will offer you the ability to engage in multiple office and property and designer disciplines with challenging risk profiles, gain an understanding of key hazards typical consultancy risk profile and integrate a H&S and wellbeing culture, as an individual and as part of a wider team. You must be able to work with both internal and external project stakeholders to ensure Health and Safety issues are properly addressed and managed during the project lifecycle. The role requires an understanding of human behaviour and behavioural safety initiatives and tools such as Hearts and Minds, +People and BBS.
What you need to do to be effective in this role
The role will require you to:

• Foster engagement across all levels to build a unified and motivated commitment to achieving zero harm.
• Encourage individuals to recognize the power of personal choice and inspire them to adopt safer behaviours for enhanced safety performance.
• Support teams in strengthening their safety culture and overall effectiveness by:
• Equipping supervisors with the skills and confidence to ensure safe work practices through coaching principles.
• Guiding leaders to embrace their responsibility in shaping a positive safety culture through visibility and strategic direction.
• Developing coaches who drive proactive safety improvements and sustainable performance enhancements.
• Establish clear connections between outstanding safety outcomes and broader business success, ensuring open communication channels that highlight opportunities for continuous improvement.
• Identify training needs and collaborate with the People team to develop and deliver health and safety training programs.
• Lead investigations into accidents and incidents, perform root cause analysis, and recommend corrective actions.
• Work closely with senior leadership and internal teams to address health and safety concerns and promote best practices.
• Drive continuous improvement in health and safety practices through audits, inspections, and feedback mechanisms.
• Carry out H&S specific management system reviews
• Promote and manage clear communication between senior leadership and KPIs outputs and management of health and safety issues at all levels
• Prepare and issue the specific Health and Safety performance reports
• Support Ridge stakeholder develop safety leadership skills
• Undertake assurance activities aligned with the cultural roadmap

The skills and experience you need to have for this role

• Bachelor's degree in occupational health and safety, Psychological Science, or a related field.
• Minimum of 15 years of experience in health and safety management, preferably within the construction industry.
• NEBOSH Diploma or equivalent certification in health and safety.
• Strong leadership, communication, and interpersonal skills. Ability to influence and drive cultural change.
• Proactively takes initiative to identify and address health and safety issues.
• Pays attention to detail and ensures thoroughness in tasks.
• Works well with others and fosters a team-oriented environment.
• Able to handle pressure and adapt to changing circumstances.

Key interfaces:

• Executives and Senior Leadership Teams
• Compliance Team
• Architects, engineers, quantity surveyors, project managers
• Health and Safety Executive employees
• Health and Safety Managers

Ridge is a Built Environment Consultancy. We provide our clients with access to a wide range of integrated expertise and professional disciplines to help them transform the quality and sustainability of the built environment.
Our people make what we do possible, helping us lead the way with quality, innovation, and entrepreneurial spirit. That's why we challenge them to be the best they can be and offer exceptional training and career development opportunities at all levels.
Ridge and Partners LLP