Inspired Interview: Sustainability & Staff Welfare with SolarGates UK
Sue Surjupersad, RTL's Product and Marketing Manager interviewed Neil Sampson, the Owner and General Manager of SolarGates UK, about their culture, his drivers and their commitment to equip ex-prisoners and recovering addicts through their prison programme, and develop safe and sustainable products. SolarGates UK are manufacturers of the Instaboom range of mobile barriers, RTL distribute to the New Zealand Market. RTL are proud of our longstanding relationship with SolarGates UK.
Rehabilitation and Workforce Integration:
It's inspiring to see your commitment to giving ex-prisoners and recovering addicts a second chance. Can you tell us about some of the personal success stories from your team and how these initiatives have shaped the culture at Solar Gates UK?
Where do we start? Everyone has been a success in their own way.
Our easy and go-to success is the crackerjack international footballer who didn’t know what a DeWalt was - to becoming a depot manager in just 3 years. She not only handles the demanding aspects of her role - traveling long distances, repairing, servicing, and installing barriers across work sites - but also navigates the prejudice as a woman in the field. Her exceptional skills make her a true ambassador for the company.
Our dynamo office manager who joined 2 weeks after release from incarceration and is one of the most capable and trusted points in the office and a font of all knowledge when it comes to the day to day.
Their past has not defined their future.
This is not to say that it always goes well. We have been to funerals of staff who have been unable to conquer their demons, but we hope we gave some temporary reprieve, and I have had the equally hard task of sending people back to jail but with more knowledge than they came to us with.
The culture in the team reflects is in the attitudes of the company:
- Nothing is impossible
- It could be worse
- Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a present.
With those precepts in the minds of the team, we can, do, and will go far.
There are tears, dramas, upsets and conflicts. These are just life. They are faced together, with openness, often humour and with the knowledge we have survived far worse.
Personal Motivation and Journey:
What inspired you to embark on this journey of supporting ex-prisoners and recovering addicts, and how has this mission impacted both your personal and professional life?
How did I arrive the company of ‘misfits who fit’? Where 40% of the team have a background of addiction or incarceration (or both)?
The real answer, is by accident.
It happened. But maybe because all I see is the need for the right person in the right job. Where they come from is irrelevant.
I have family exposure to both addiction and prison which has probably lead to my open-mindedness and I have no doubt this background has allowed me to see the person, not the mistake.
The open-mindedness to allow it to evolve as part for of the culture within the company, hasn’t come from just me, but all the staff willing to embrace any new person to the team. However (I hope) I lead by example.
The open mindedness, creativity and innovative attitudes are sometimes developed over time or other times these qualities are already there ready to be harnessed. I come back to just needing the right person in the right place for the job to be done.
That last point to highlight is really important. This is not an entirely altruistic venture, it works both ways. The key in our strap line of ‘Misfits who fit’ is ‘fit’. Everyone has at some time been in a situation where they don’t fit. In our team so long as they fit, they are welcome. But they have to fit, because we have no room for numpties.
Our first employee from the prison service did not come to us when we had our brand values defined as they are or our strapline of ‘misfits who fit’ as their headline. They came to us to do a job. It was only later on that their story came out a little and we were introduced to the employment officer at the local women’s prison. That evolved over the years to have several ladies working on day release. Some are still with us, some have used their time at Solar Gates as a springboard to greater things and some have quietly gone their own way after release.
From those early beginnings, Solar Gates UK have dug into the prisons journey. They Chair a Prisons Employment Advisory board, have hosted the Second UK Prisons Employment Conference to 100’s of employers, taught Interview skills to dozens of inmates, won awards for the work with ex-offenders and have award winning, ex-offender, staff on the team. Re-employment upon release is one of the biggest factors in reducing reoffending and core government mandate for the prison service. We love to spread the word, the awesome win-win benefits and help to reduce the £mutli-billion cost the economy.
Future Aspirations and Inspirations:
Are there any programs or initiatives out there that you particularly admire and would like to integrate into solar gates, or that you aspire to emulate in your future efforts?
An aspiration of Solar Gates is raising the profile of addiction and breaking down the barriers (see what we did there) of getting people suffering with addition the help they need and addressing the stigma associated with the disease.
Now, we are not saying that it’s OK for an active addict to be working on the highway, or anywhere for that matter. But in the UK, we come from an old school, ‘work hard, play hard’ ethos. There will be many who have crossed that imperceivable line from play hard into addiction. And that is a line that is currently not tolerated in the industry, for good reasons. But it shouldn’t mean that help isn’t available. Help should always be available to those who want it.
With regards to initiatives that we admire and would like to emulate, we were introduced to an in-house addiction recovery program run by Transport for London. They have a team to support employees, who open-up to substance abuse problems. It has clear and strict boundaries, contractual obligations and overwhelmingly excellent support. A member of staff who has reached their rock bottom has some where to go for help. But moreover, there is a culture where that is accepted and supported. They are taken out of the workplace immediately and enter an assessment period. If appropriate, they will then spend up to 12 weeks in a residential rehabilitation before returning to more in house support and a staged return to work. And once at work, they remain under contractual obligations to continue receiving regular support, d&a testing and other safeguarding commitments.
Solar Gates saw this model and the spotted the genius in the open-minded approach.
In our small team we have had the opportunity to implement this model twice, both times with overwhelming success. Whilst we don’t have a department dedicated to it, the process has been the same. That’s 10 % of our team who have benefitted from an addiction recovery program and a 100% success rate for those who did.
And why does it work for the business – as well as the employee? On a humanistic level, the opportunity to offer real help to someone suffering with substance misuse is a gift worth giving. From a business perspective, 12 weeks rehab costs the same as a recruitment consultants charge to refill a position. But it doesn’t cover the hours of training and experience you have put into a new employee. It doesn't compensate for loyalty and retention you get from happy staff. So, it’s the best thing to do from a P&L perspective too. It just needs an open mind to a new way of thinking.
It is our ambition to see a more collaborative industry where workers are at the heart of everything: their safety and health are paramount. But the Highways and Construction industry needs to come together more to provide a united front and put profit to one side for a moment. But as the single largest employer after hospitality, an industry working together could change many, many lives.
In all our ventures we remember our values. Innovative, Capable, Passionate and Compassionate. It is the last value that it often the hardest.
- Compassionate to our team
- Compassionate to our customers
- Compassionate to the earth
If we find ourselves being compassionate in favour of one, but that is dispassionate the rest, we have gone the wrong way.
Knowing the difference between supporting and enabling is a hard line to spot but a hard line not to cross.
Only of someone asks for help will the addition recovery model work.
And when it works – it REALLY works.
Sustainability Journey - Insights from Neil
Another area of passion for us but, the passion resides in being truthful. We are in a world where buzzwords ‘Zero Carbon’, ‘Sustainable’, are thrown around. Our Grandparents simply called this ‘reuse, reduce, recycle and live within your means’.
The only true answer to lowering the global carbon footprint is to USE LESS. We do not claim to manufacture zero carbon products, because they are not made that way. They are made from steel, aluminium, silicon, galvanised and shipped around the world. They are zero carbon upon delivery to our customers - that would be true. But our carbon cost of manufacture is still there.
We are living in a connected world. Highways is particularly ambitious to be more ‘connected’. But at what cost and for what reason. As data and AI technologies advance rapidly, the energy consumption of data storage has risen to approximately 2.5% of global power usage and water consumption, with this figure expected to increase.
Technology can do amazing things, but we often find ourselves asking the question, ‘just because I can, does it mean I should?’.
INSTABOOM Go illustrates this well. We've been asked to cloud-connect them “because everything else has it.” But why should I add another dataset to the cloud and another cellular device that pings satellites every 10 minutes? These devices are operated by skilled individuals, within their line of sight, and are taken home at the end of each shift. They don’t need to be connected. Just because I can doesn’t mean I should…
We want our global industry to collaborate further around sustainability and the ‘green agenda’. Solutions can be simple and low powered and overly technical complicated solutions often come at a ‘green price’.
Global power consumption has tripled in 40 years. Unless we use less, nothing will change.
