Health, Safety and Wellbeing Strategy

Workplace health, safety and wellbeing are key to achieving operational excellence, as they reinforce our commitment to each and every person who joins our team. This involves working toward implementing measures to prevent occupational hazards.

One of the ways we do this  is by establishing a the four pillars of our Health, Safety and Wellbeing strategy:

Resilience

Known as the intrinsic capacity of a system to adjust its functioning prior to, during, or following changes or disturbances and thereby sustain normal operations notwithstanding the circumstances. We now know that sometimes things go wrong, so it is necessary to consider the possibility of failure and factor it into the pertinent management approaches. Here, resilience plays a vital role in helping us go one step beyond the conventional approach towards one that enables us to address any situation, no matter how unexpected.

This evolution in resilience serves to further underpin our existing knowledge of methods and techniques as we improve them on a constant basis. We can only move forward if we understand our day-to-day operations and how to respond to things that would otherwise be invisible to us.

Competency

To ensure that this culture is maximally effective, it’s also necessary to guarantee that the employees, the ones bearing the responsibility, have everything they need to do the job.

We have recently identified a set of best practices for providing a more structured and coherent approach to competency, and it was in this context that the “License to Operate” was conceived.

The goal of this initiative is to identify positions that are critical to safety, ensure that people have the skills they need for the job, that the organization’s training needs are assessed accurately, and that colleagues are prepared for career development and mobility throughout the company.

Leadership

Our leaders are the ones who will drive the change towards our future. We need to inspire colleagues in order to drive and shape the difference.

Leadership in this area does not necessarily emanate from the Management Committee or from senior or middle management. The best leaders are those who help their co-workers to improve their habits effortlessly. The secret is to see people as collaborators, since they represent the solution, not the problem.

It’s also important to recognize and reward colleagues´ achievements and participation. When colleagues and their work are valued, this increases their satisfaction and productivity, motivating them to maintain or improve their performance.

Engagement

Surveys show that companies with a higher level of engagement have 70% fewer accidents than companies with less engagement.

To encourage motivation and engagement, it’s important to establish safety as a core value of the corporate culture, apply positive reinforcement, and make colleagues feel they own the safety process. Engaging the project team is important to produce a safe working environment where employees feel not only safe to work, but also safe to speak up when there is an issue. When all colleagues are engaged in safety at all levels, they all become safety managers, helping to ensure everyone gets home safe and sound at the end of the day.