We strive for zero work-related incidents by caring for the well-being and safety of our employees and everyone we work with.
At KAEFER, we employ over 30,000 people and work in approximately 30 countries around the world, often in extreme environmental conditions and / or isolated locations. Our health & safety programs aim to prevent work-related injury and ill health through high standards and active employee consultation. Our global HSEQ community consists of almost 700 HSEQ manager and officers.
“To perform their tasks safely, KAEFER provides the right equipment, high quality Personal Protective Equipment, and relevant and ongoing training.”
Michael Sturm, Head of Corporate HSEQ
Our motivation
To make sure all our people return home safely at the end of each working day, we invest substantial resources in fostering an inclusive safety culture, as well as in providing state of the art equipment, tools, and training for our employees. We perform regular assessments looking at a range of different issues, including typical behaviours within a given working culture, risks posed by specific working environments, and risks posed by particular activities.
Our guiding principles – which extend to our business partners, as well as employees – go beyond providing a healthy working environment. We work hard to ensure healthy decisions are made within our teams, focussing on mental as well as physical health. We monitor well-being and provide individual support where necessary and foster a culture of open error management and continuous improvement.
Actions
Sustainability commitment To achieve a 50% reduction in group wide LTIF by 2030, compared with 2022 figures
We are proud of our record on health and safety at KAEFER. The continuous downward trend can be traced to our ongoing Safety Culture campaign which aims to develop awareness of risk among staff and a workplace that’s safer than ever before. We feel confident there is still room for further improvement, which is why we have set ourselves the goal of halving LTIF by 2030, using our already impressive 2022 figures as the benchmark.
Our commitment to the active promotion of a mutually supportive health and safety culture throughout the company is formalised in our Health and Safety Policy and ESG policies – which describe our HSEQ guiding principles, risk related guidelines, and recommended best practices. All our health and safety measures are audited and reviewed on a yearly basis, with the results communicated to KAEFER’s HSEQ community at regular intervals.
Achieving our goals requires improved risk management systems and improved communications around health & safety. Thereby, improved data helps us identify trends and isolate issues before they become problems. In 2022, KAEFER began working with a new Incident Management and integrated ESG reporting tool, designed to increase engagement and awareness among KAEFER employees at all levels. User-friendly reporting tools make data collection easy and deliver consistency – providing the transparent access to data we need to ensure accurate and meaningful insights.
Outlook
KAEFER’s “We take action 4“ campaign: Each quarter of 2023 will be dedicated to programs, initiatives and best practices covering the interconnected areas of health, continues to pay dividends, with both LTIF and TRCF falling on a year-by-year basis. safety, the environment, and quality.
Performance disclosure
YTD - Year-To-Date, LTIF - ‘Lost Time Incident Frequency’ refers to lost time incidents per one million man-hours, ‘Lost time’ being a situation where a worker needs to stay home following an injury. TRCF - also counted per one million manhours, stands for Total Recordable Cases Frequency’ and consists of all incidents which have to be included in the statistics. Share of ISO9001 and ISO45001 certification is based on annual total operating performance before consolidation.
Promoting an inclusive safety culture at locations around the world has contributed greatly to our vision of achieving zero work-related injuries. The more we understand how health & safety connects with the working environment and quality control processes, the safer our work environment becomes. At KAEFER, we actively share HSEQ principles with line managers and their teams, providing the tools and support they need to act early and prevent accidents.
In 2022, the main causes of injury at KAEFER were slips, trips, and falls, typically affecting hands, fingers, legs, ankles or arms. KAEFER’s Lost Time Injury Frequency (LTIF) and Total Recordable Case Frequency (TRCF) figures from 2022 demonstrate that our work towards creating a safety culture at KAEFER continues to pay dividends, with both LTIF and TRCF falling on a year-by-year basis.
Health & Safety – Awards and notable achievements in 2022
Brazil On 15 December, RIP‘s (KAEFER‘s subsidiary in Brazil) Espírito Santo branch were awarded an “Appreciation for Exemplary Occupational Safety“ certificate in recognition of 3 million safeworking hours at the Tubarão steel plant.
France On 6 September, a ceremony took place at Chooz nuclear power plant to thank KAEFER WANNER teams for three accident-free years.
Malaysia Client Dialog E&C Sdn Bhd honoured KAEFER‘s team for 500,000 safe working hours without LTI on the Pengerang Integrated Complex Project.
UAE On 16 September, KAEFER reached an extraordinary 50 million working hours without LTI in the UAE. Client SAIPEM also recognised the team for their contribution to 3million LTI-free working hours on the Optimum Shah Gas Expansion project in Abu Dhabi.
UK & Ireland In November, KAEFER won the National Access & Scaffolding Confederations prestigious HSE Award. The winners were praised for their strong campaigns and particularly for their Mental Health Champions campaign, which saw more than 6.4% of the workforce trained in Mental Health First Aid over the course of the year.
