Our Safety Leadership/Take Care programme is a comprehensive global safety programme with two main elements. The first, Safety Leadership, is aimed at managers at all levels and has four main objectives.
These are to:
- Cultivate a sincere and visible personal commitment to workplace safety and the concept of ‘safe production’, by caring for colleagues’ wellbeing and helping to resolve safety issues on their behalf.
- Develop a vision of safety which inspires others, sets high standards for safety behaviours, solicits commitments to safety and engages with employees on safety issues.
- Make decisions with safety in mind by listening to safety concerns, including employees in the safety management process, and ensuring regular, robust and meaningful safety reporting takes places.
- Ensure transparency on safety performance through open communication and by encouraging a culture of continuous improvement.
The second element, Take Care, is designed for supervisors and the teams they lead, to change the mindset of our workforce and foster a sense of personal accountability for the safety of their work environment and one another. It reinforces the fact that safety begins with every individual, regardless of their role or level in the organisation. Supervisors however, also have a key role as safety leaders, to reinforce the mindfulness of and respect for the Golden Rules within their teams.
The three Golden Rules are:
- See the risks, understand them, act to mitigate them.
- Speak up when you see a potential risk or safety violation.
- Feel empowered to take ownership of safety concerns for oneself or others.
Ten-year initiative
Designed to embed safety into everyone’s day-to-day work, our Safety Leadership/Take Care programme was launched in Europe 2016. This 10-year, three-phase initiative is designed to equip both leaders and employees to create a culture of safety at the sites and facilities where they work. So far, 45,000 employees in Europe and 9,000 in Argentina and Brazil, where it was launched in 2017, have completed phase one of Take Care. ‘Master trainers’ were also coached in 2018 and 2019 to deliver the programme in Costa Rica, Mexico, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Phase two is currently in progress in Europe, with 7,500 employees already trained, and this phase was launched in Brazil in Q3 2019.
Positive results
The Safety Leadership/Take Care programme delivers experiential training, with modules designed to embed an instinctive safety culture at our operations. The programme also enables us to track progress and participation effectively. Three years since its launch in Europe, it is already showing positive results on the continent. Safety conditions are visibly improved at sites where the programme has been running and lost-time injuries have been reduced. Fatality rates have seen significant reductions. Our data show this to be strongly associated with both the Take Care programme and also the proactive reporting of PSIFs (potentially serious injuries and fatalities), which is something we have also focused on since 2016.