Caring for people means refusing to compromise on safety. We target Zero Harm not only in our own operations, but also across the entire value chain. Slowly but surely, we are beginning to make progress and in 2024 recorded a Total Recordable Case Frequency (TRCF, the number of incidents per 200,000 working hours) for our own employees of 0.92, a significant reduction on the previous year’s 1.17. Of 455 recorded incidents, however, nine were serious compared to seven in 2023. We are extremely saddened to report that SHV Energy and Mammoet each suffered a fatality during the year. Despite the initial signs of improvement, we still have a long way to go to reach the industry benchmark TRCF of 0.4.
Over the course of 2024, we continued to place the emphasis on three key safety programs.
Life Saving Rules (LSR) provide a consistent approach to incident prevention across the Groups, with each following a specific set of rules reflecting the relevant safety hazards.
The Visible and Felt Leadership program ensures that management makes safety priority number one in everything we do and every decision we make ahead of economic, customer and all other considerations.
Operational Discipline and Process Safety continually reviews our operations, equipment and processes to identify any potential risk and swiftly take any action required.
Together, these three programs are playing an essential role on the journey to delivering levels of safety over and above industry benchmarks.
To reinforce these programs, we also focused on shifting the responsibility for safety directly to the line organization or shop floor, with centralized Health and Safety taking a more supporting, coaching and advisory role. This move will also provide the foundation for a Just Culture, which not only involves looking at the technical side of any safety related incident, but also at organizational accountability. Safety performance metrics now form part of the basis for senior management compensation.
In April, Nutreco completed the roll-out of its EcoOnline safety tooling. Also used by SHV Energy and Mammoet, EcoOnline is designed to facilitate the accurate, timely and comprehensive reporting of incidents, safety observations, and follow-up actions. Kiwa began to roll-out Kiwa Impact, its own in-house tool developed with similar aims, and plans to complete the launch by mid-2025.
SHV Energy accelerated the pace of improvements to road and transport related safety, combining innovative technologies with smart road transport management. The Group also made progress on the development of four board games designed to engage employees in safety conversations. Mammoet took an innovative step forward in the world of computer gaming, using IT models to simulate scenarios and train employees in real-world scenarios.
As part of a cross-Group initiative, policies relating to alcohol, drug possession and usage, and mobile phone use in traffic were tightened and aligned. The policy now clearly stipulates a zero tolerance approach to alcohol and drugs, while severely limiting the use of mobile phones in traffic.
Safety Week included a very impactful webinar hosted by our CEO and featuring interviews with victims and colleagues who have been affected by serious incidents in the past. The week also incorporated a wide range of local, safety focused initiatives across the Groups.
Looking to the year ahead, we will continue driving our core safety programs while also prioritizing the transition of responsibility to the line organization. We are also committed to improving safety-related communication and dialogue at every level throughout the organization, not least by sharing learnings of any incident that may occur.
We cannot overlook the fact that the number of long-term incidents, and the resulting impact on our employees and operations, remains significant. We plan to thoroughly investigate the root causes of these incidents during the coming months to identify the actions that will help us to prevent them from taking place in the future.