HEALTH AND SAFETY
A SHARED RESPONSIBILITY
Ferrovial strives to create risk-free environments for its employees and the user of its infrastructures under the premise that all accidents can be avoided by implementing the appropriate preventive measures.
At the end of 2019, the Board of Directors approved its 2020-2023 Health, Safety and Wellbeing Strategy, which is implemented through annual plans and focuses on four strategic elements:
LEADERSHIP
Objective: workers inspire, care for and are strict about complying with health, safety and wellbeing expectations.
Ferrovial is committed to the health, safety and wellbeing of its employees, and each employee must be a leader in this area to make a difference. Under this premise, the company seeks to inspire people to refocus their leadership, how they regard this and how they enforce this. In 2020, a variety of different initiatives have been rolled out:
- Personal commitments: at the start of the year, a campaign was launched asking employees how they will help to drive change at Ferrovial. In this sense, all Management Committee members are firmly committed to health, safety and wellbeing.
- Health, Safety and Wellbeing Awards: compensation and recognition are a fundamental value as part of Ferrovial’s Health, Safety and Wellbeing Strategy. Therefore, the Chairman has sponsored the recent launch of the Health, Safety and Wellbeing Awards, which can be divided into three categories: leader in health, safety and wellbeing; high-performance team; and best innovative technical solution implemented.
- Safety leadership teams: the aim of this incentive is to create an environment in which open and transparent communication is promoted to ensure the best possible decisions are taken, seeking excellence in strategic management.
FREQUENCY RATE
HOURS OF HEALTH AND SAFETY TRAINING
HEALTH AND SAFETY INSPECTIONS AND AUDITS
COMPETENCE
Objective: ensure teams are competent, qualified and empowered to perform their duties.
With a view to optimizing the training efforts made by the company, the “License to Operate” program has been created; the aim of this program is to identify critical roles in the field of health, safety and wellbeing, for which a series of specific competencies are defined that are required to perform in these roles. These requirements will be flexible depending on the needs of the country, rolled out in an escalated manner to all positions and responsibilities and revised each year to support the development of all individuals. Furthermore, all levels will be addressed, from senior management, to middle management, team leaders and supervisors, across all workplaces.
The initiative will be implemented in different phases and, when it has been rolled out in its entirety, it will provide the company with reassurance that it has skilled workers in each of the areas identified, making it possible to provide the necessary health, safety and wellbeing training with precision.
RESILIENCE
Objective: Ferrovial is prepared to protect its workers, stakeholders and businesses against adverse circumstances.
Resilience is a characteristic of an organization that offers greater resistance to incidents and accidents and the ability to successfully respond to any eventuality. Therefore, health, safety and wellbeing have been fully included in the corporate strategy and life cycle of projects in 2020. The company works in different areas to achieve greater resilience:
- Knowing what to do, being capable of responding to disruptions and existing/common events.
- Knowing what to look for, controlling critical points.
- Knowing what to expect, anticipating possible future events.
- Knowing what has happened, learning from experience and drawing on lessons learned.
Based on the foregoing, the company focuses on High Potential Events, i.e. events with the potential to cause a fatal or catastrophic accident, but that have been avoided. Given their significance, these events are analyzed each week by the Management Committee and, since April, Executive Incident Reviews have been performed on each of them to implement lessons learned and critical controls to prevent them from happening again.
With this in mind, the current indicators have also been kept under observation. In 2020, 71,796 inspections and audits were carried out and 389,701 hours of training on health and safety matters imparted. Thanks to the improvement actions implemented and the commitment of all workers, the frequency rate has decreased by 54.1% compared to 2015, and by 10.96% compared to last year.
IH-10 Project, Texas, United Satates.
COMMITMENT
Objective: generating a learning environment that promotes the exchange of knowledge, innovation and effective communication.
Ferrovial seeks to create an environment for constant learning, share knowledge, communicate effectively and obtain correct information, at the right time to take the best possible decisions. In 2020, a year in which the commitment of employees has been particularly important due to the pandemic, emphasis has been placed on:
- Promoting communication: videos, guidance, protocols and indications have been distributed using all the available internal channels with a view to maintaining employees informed and up to date.
- Employee health and wellbeing: the HASAVI health and wellbeing program has been redefined, with an online platform created featuring activities streamed every day, in addition to a variety of articles and guides to handle lockdown as best as possible.
COMMITMENT TO INNOVATION
For Ferrovial, innovation is a lever for change to improve performance in health, safety and wellbeing. For this reason, it has continued with the work started in 2018 at the Safety Lab to become a tool to be used to provide solutions to the challenges that workers face every day during operations at all workplaces. More information available about the Safety Lab in the “Innovation” section of this Report.