Business Champion – WJ Group

WJ Group is one of the UK’s leading road safety and highway maintenance businesses. It specialises in delivering road markings, road studs, high friction and coloured safety surfacing, retexturing, crack and joint sealing, industrial surface preparation, marine surface coatings, TASCAR, CCTV, and stopped vehicle detection, as well as other Intelligent Traffic Solutions services and products.

Overall, the business has 13 depots, including two material manufacturing plants, two vehicle fabrication facilities, a driver training academy and vehicle workshop support at each depot. It has over 650 employees, and a fleet of more than 400 vehicles.

Its fleet is essential to its work, and WJ takes its control of its vehicles to an unusual degree, by building its own specialist trucks. “WJ Group employees install road markings in communities across the UK, and given the location of their work are vulnerable road users while they work, so safety for them and those communities is a key concern,” says Sustainability Director Paul Aldridge.

“Reducing work-related road risk is our passion. We make our living by laying road safety markings, which are designed to make roads safer and more efficient. Safety is also one of our core values, and that extends beyond the boundaries of the sites we work on, to the roads we travel, and into all our actions.

Many years ago, we were contracted to install cycle lanes in London. We were creating protective lanes for vulnerable road users (VRUs), and we realised then that we had a moral and ethical duty to ensure that our own fleet did not pose a risk to these VRUs – but we also realised that our own workforce shared the same risks. They are VRUs while they work. We do all we can to minimise the risk our people and vehicles present to the communities we serve, which also makes the road environment safer for our own people.

Additionally, climate change is the greatest threat facing our species and transport is a major contributor to global warming. As we strive to drive down our use of fossil fuels, we need to have a positive effect on air quality emissions too for local communities and our people.”
Paul Aldridge, Sustainability Director, WJ Group

Vision and Values

WJ Group is built on specific values which shape its approach and operational protocols. The vision ‘Creating Safe, Sustainable Journeys for Everyone’, prioritises the following values:

• Safety, healthy people
• Community, their people and the communities and environment where they operate
• Delivery, through great service.
• Innovation, developing and adopting new technologies and techniques

Fleet Numbers

HGVs: 250
LCVs: 86
Company cars: 94
Employees: >600
Fuel usage: Three million litres a year

WJ Group Operations

WJ Group’s workers are most frequently situated on the road itself, and this makes work-related road risk a double-barrelled issue. On the one hand it must manage the risk of its own vehicles and employees in relation to other road users. On the other, it must safeguard its employees who inevitably spend time as pedestrians and using equipment on the roads themselves, often using temporary traffic management but without the benefit of a full road closure.

Paul says that this realisation – that the risk faced by vulnerable road users and their own employees are one and the same – means that the company is committed to not simply being a road marking specialist but a road safety organisation, promoting best practice and risk reduction as part of its daily operations.

Telematics

For WJ Group, road safety and environmental protection go hand in hand. The fleet uses three million litres of diesel a year. Fuel reductions involve minimising mileage and promoting safer driving behaviours which lowers road risk and the company’s carbon impact.

WJ implemented a driver behaviour scheme which enabled it to accurately review its drivers’ performance using Quartix telematics and combined it with an ongoing and significant rewards system to maintain standards.

Since this was introduced across the fleet 15 months ago, it has successfully increased mpg by 12% and reduced CO2 emissions by 7.5%, equivalent to 594 tonnes of CO2 or 225,000 litres of diesel.

The monthly competition to incentivise good driving behaviour rewards the best driver in each depot with £100, and an overall prize annually of £1,000. 

Those drivers who under-perform are assessed by the group’s two in-house driver-trainers and are given coaching and in-cab training.

Business Benefits from behavioural change

• Less speeding and harsh acceleration, and smoother braking and cornering
• Improved community perception

Over a 15 month period the company achieved:

• 40% reduction in accidents
• 45% reduction in associated costs
• 12% increase in mpg
• 7.5% reduction in Scope 1 emissions

Accreditations and Awards

WJ Group is a CLOCS champion, and its fleet is either FORS Silver or Bronze accredited depending upon the application.

The UK Champions Awards 2022 – UK Fleet Champions – Fleet Safety Innovation Award 2022

Logistics UK LERS Leadership in Emissions Reduction Award 2020

It has also embraced Driving for Better Business and uses DfBB resources in training and driver communications.

Build Your Own

WJ Group buys its chassis from major truck manufacturers but then builds the final bodywork at its West Yorkshire plant. The chassis costs £70K- £80K but the final vehicle will be worth £150,000, and highly specialised. 

As a result, the fleet is an enormous capital asset to WJ Group, and this is an excellent incentive to keep those vehicles roadworthy and prevent damage.

Building their own vehicles also means that safety is designed in, and safety equipment is added as an integral part of the manufacturing process rather than retrofitted. This means the company can seamlessly update vehicles, and immediately produce new vehicles with the latest kit. All their vehicles have proximity sensors and blind spot cameras as standard. 

Roadworthiness compliance is a natural extension of the group’s commitment to safety and the protection of its assets. Drivers are equipped with the r2c Connected Fleet and Workshop app, which records their daily vehicle checks and sends defects alerts to the workshop.

Driver Training

Most HGVs must be driven by someone with a corresponding C or C+E licence. However, road marking trucks can be driven on a car licence. This is not an exemption WJ Group takes advantage of. It trains all of its drivers to HGV standards, and pays for their licence acquisition as part of their road marking apprenticeship. 

It does not have to comply with Driver CPC continuous training rules, but it does nonetheless provide its own courses, based on the CPC curriculum, and to CPC standard. These cover topics such as the environment, safe loading, and walkaround vehicle checks.

Every new recruit has a week-long induction which takes them through all the company policies and spends a lot of time discussing WRRR.

The company also holds toolbox talks, and the annual ‘company days’ always include segments on WRRR. Drivers complete the appropriate FORS courses where specified.

Policies and Compliance

The Group Fleet Policy is backed by 17 further individual policies, ensuring legal compliance, and is a fundamental part of the Group integrated management systems. WJ Group’s Compliance Plan sets out clear procedures and responsibilities for: Management, Vehicles, Drivers, and Operations, including routeing and work schedules. Driver responsibilities are underlined by the handbook. 

WJ’s Safety Team led by Health & Safety Director Craig Williams is a fundamental part of this integrated approach to WRRR. All road traffic incidents are investigated by the Safety Team working with the Transport and Logistics Team to ensure that all road incidents are treated equally. 

Craig Williams says: “Road traffic incidents and accidents are treated with equal gravitas to any safety issue. Sadly, this has not necessarily been the case across industry where incidents beyond site boundaries have not always been treated this way.”

Driver Welfare

Work-related road risk is a major factor in considering driver welfare – and driver welfare affects road risk. The safety ‘imperative’, as Paul calls it, is managed jointly between the Group Fleet Manager Scott Logan, the Training Manager Alan Brookes and Craig Williams with the Health and Safety Team.

However, WJ Group goes further, with a comprehensive driver offering which educates and supports them holistically with fitness, health, stress management and fatigue prevention. A counsellor is available, and the corporate culture demands that every employee is treated with fairness, inclusion and respect.

WJ believes that drivers who are healthy in mind and body, supported in their concerns are safer and more productive.

Improving Behaviour

“Our behaviour and actions influence our culture and the community’s perception of us as an organisation,” says Craig. “We, in common with all fleet operators, have a significant number of incidents caused by poor behaviour.”

The company has taken action to improve driver behaviour across the board, and to emphasise that whatever community teams are working within, is their community for the day. 

“Our teams are constantly doing small amounts of traffic management to progress with their jobs. We hope that other drivers are courteous to them and drive safely. The amount of abuse workers in public spaces are subject to seems to be growing, which is concerning.

“We spend a lot of time and effort dealing with the public. It is important for our employees to always remember their common ground – that they share road risk with the people around them and that every community is in effect our community. If you drive and work as though the people around you are known to you, you are instinctively more careful of them.”

As a result, employee engagement has improved. 

WJ employed the expertise of psychologist and behaviourist Professor Damian Hughes, who addressed to all their staff as to how behaviour determines outcomes. Good behaviours create good outcomes and safe behaviours determine safe outcomes.

Decarbonisation

The Race2NetZero is an urgent priority for WJ Group. It measures, and have independently verified, its Scope 1 and 2 emissions and produce monthly fleet reports of CO2 as well as air quality emissions such as NOx, PMs, CO and hydrocarbons. The WJ fleet has the biggest environmental impact as a large user of diesel, but WJ is already planning its shift to alternative-fuelled vehicles. Battery electric vehicles may prove the best option, even for the heavier vehicles in the fleet, as they typically do a very small mileage and so range is not a concern. The company says it is two years away from developing its first EV road-marking truck, which should allow operations to be quieter, which is important for night-time working and community impact, as well as delivering zero tailpipe emissions.

All its cars are now electric or hybrid, and its vans will be too by 2026. “Our vans do considerable mileage,” says Paul, “but we have plans in place to make this happen.”

The company has also planted 327,000 trees in Scotland to help offset its carbon emissions. 

And its decarbonisation plans don’t stop there. The road marking materials used to ‘paint’ the roads are a mixture of aggregates, reflective elements, a binder system, and coloured pigment. WJ Group has found that simply by switching from a hydrocarbon binder system to a biogenic system it has reduced the embodied carbon of these materials by 80%. They also use mainly recycled materials, up to 90% in many products. Overall, this has removed 20,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent annually. 

Paul says: “We all face the existential risk of global warming. Mitigating the impacts and moving to Net Zero are fundamental to us all. Improving air quality is also a key factor for us. Our workforce is constantly exposed to the particulate pollution caused by road traffic, which is a major public health concern. These issues are synonymous and urgent, and we must all address them, in every way we can. Mitigating road risk is vital to us, bringing us back to ‘Creating Safe, Sustainable Journeys for Everyone’.”