The physical and mental health and safety of our employees and all people who work with us is of the highest priority. With a focus on preventative safety through model behaviors and the promotion of mental health, we put safety first in everything we do.
Based on our materiality assessment, we have categorized ➜ our material topics. In the stream People with Impact, we strive for ➜ diverse, motivated and empowered employees and encourage each and every one – no matter their role in our company – to learn and grow. As the safety and well-being of our employees, partners and customers is crucial for us, we take the promotion of a safe and healthy work environment very seriously and support it actively. Finally, we advance ➜ social engagement with our local stakeholder to support sustainable development in their communities, because we value them and their wellbeing highly.
“Through our behavior-based safety program, our mental health initiatives and safety education, we are building a positive safety culture within Beckers.”
At Beckers, we aim to be a role model for well-being, which is why we follow clear ➜ goals, including our aim to achieve zero accidents by 2030. We run and track the success of our global behavior-based safety program to reduce the probability of workplace accidents and injuries, and prevent them from happening in the first place. See ➜ our progress.
We take a holistic approach to safety, work to prevent accidents, and focus on people and the consequences of accidents. While reporting the figures accurately is one part, we also analyze, visualize, learn from and improve safety performance. By focusing on behaviors, safety observations and all kinds of smaller accidents such as minor injuries, we aim to reduce risks for severe accidents. An important aspect of safety is mental health and corresponding initiatives are part of our annual targets. While ➜ LTI (Lost Time Injury) is still an indicator among the other indicators in our reporting, we focus on the ➜ Total Recordable Injuries (TRI) as a KPI to track our zero accident target.
At Beckers, the mental and physical health of our employees and their families are a particularly high priority. As a company that works with chemicals and machinery, we must take the potential risk of accidents in our value chain seriously. Our employees’ exposure to chemicals and related dangerous gases such as ➜ volatile organic compounds (VOC) is an important subject for us. Furthermore, we must ensure the safety of our employees while using machinery by providing appropriate work clothing and safety instructions in our buildings.
Every day, we strive to make our workplace as safe as it can be. We focus on preventative safety through behavior models, operational excellence programs and the promotion of mental health. We provide tools for employees to improve their health, offer training opportunities to employees, contractors and customers, and train our managers to be safety role models who inspire and inform. Due to our measures, we are not only protecting our people from any health hazards, but we contribute positively to their well-being.
Through regular self-assessments, constant monitoring and audits, we ensure compliance with established standards. Health and Safety is globally regulated and managed through the Health and Safety Director. On each site, the Managing Director (MD), the Environmental, Health and Safety (EHS) Manager and EHS Management Committees are responsible for dealing with all health- and safety-related matters. The MD is responsible for coordinating with the site’s EHS Manager, who has overall control of and responsibility for risk observation reporting and the local database. All personnel working or operating on any of the Beckers sites are covered by the Health and Safety Management System.
Supplementary to our HS Management System, we launched new global software in 2022 to support our health and safety functions. The database is designed to report and track all incidents and safety observations efficiently in one central place and draw lessons for the future. An audit module enables us to conduct self-assessments and audits of our safety performance. 74 percent (17 out of 23) of our production sites have ISO 14001 certification, and 39 percent of our sites have ISO 45001 certification. All local systems operate in accordance with local legislation, advancements in science and technology, and industrial best practices.
We conducted a pilot on mental health in Malaysia in 2021, and rolled out a global initiative in 2022. We use a decentralized approach to respect country-specific needs and regularly share best practices in the HR community to learn from each other. In UK for example, we have volunteers who received training as mental aid first aiders and are eager to learn about the impact of this initiative going forward.
We operate in a fast-changing regulatory environment. Therefore, it is extremely important to ensure business continuity. We take a proactive approach to implementing any necessary changes, from both a risk mitigation and advocacy perspective. Beckers has formalized a process to assess and document employee health and safety risks. We have standard operating procedures for hazard identification, safety reporting, and incident investigation and analysis, in place globally. All our sites have strict emergency response procedures and evacuation plans. We have conducted health and safety risk assessments for 100 percent of our sites. Global regulations on personal protection equipment, the transport and handling of hazardous materials and our risk management policy complete our system. All sites are audited every two to three years by insurance companies depending on risk, set-up complexity and the size of the site.
All companies within Beckers are required to ensure that all accidents, incidents and unsafe conditions are reported in a timely manner, investigated according to specific requirements and are acted on to prevent further accidents or incidents of a similar nature at their sites. Work-related incidents are reported monthly following GRI standards and displayed in a dashboard for the management team. The same hierarchy of controls applies as above. To prevent accidents, extensive risk reporting and follow-up are carried out as effectively as possible through the global database with safety observations and near-miss reports. Each site is required to record, track and complete actions in a timely manner for any issues arising from risk observation reporting. To effectively learn from and address risk observations, all sites must implement a process for identifying, reporting, investigating, documenting, communicating and analyzing them.
The site manager and the EHS team are in charge of setting up an appropriate reporting system to ensure that the local management team stays on top of safety observation reporting. Department managers have direct responsibility to ensure all actions are recorded, incidents are investigated and solutions fed back in a timely manner to the EHS manager as database owner.
Senior Management is obliged to encourage all colleagues to report their observations using the risk observation reporting forms. The reporting forms are available through the global database as well as in paper form for people who have no access to a computer. Where appropriate, an EHS Alert or Learning Lessons report is prepared to enable all other sites to benefit from the findings and recommendations. All outcomes must be communicated to the staff via communication sessions (for example toolbox, talks, EHS briefing sessions).
Mandatory health services according to a global standard are provided on all sites. These range from regular training (for example on safety, ➜ Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) etc.) to personnel trained in first aid and a health and safety committee on every site to in-house nurses and complete medical check-ups on the larger sites. Regular health care initiatives and safety talks are organized at all locations. Additionally, a variety of healthcare services are provided depending on the legal framework and general health standard in the different countries. They include, for example, mental health programs, insurance policies, medical check-ups and vaccinations.
All people on the sites including employees, contract workers and visitors, have access to health and safety measures and can raise concerns and highlight potential hazards via safety observations (digitally or on paper). Furthermore, they can give feedback directly to a manager, members of the health and safety committee, in the employee survey or in quarterly ➜ Check-In Conversations. Health and safety are addressed at our global townhalls on a regular basis. In these sessions,employees have the chance to raise questions and topics with top management.These topics are also communicated in our 2030 Sustainability Strategy goalsand are part of the yearly targets and variable compensation.
All sites have a health and safety committee that holds regular meetings. The committee is responsible for monitoring safety on site, communicating safety measures, organizing training, taking actions and reporting to the Global Health and Safety Director. Depending on the size of the site, this is organized differently, sometimes also with the support of external consultants.
Regular training is a fundamental principle of our EHS policy. Beckers provides initial training for all new employees, specific topic training, licensing training (e.g., for forklift drivers) as well as periodical and mandatory sessions, especially in high-risk areas and for contractors. The trainings are tracked via our global database.
In 2022, we executed our behavior-based safety program and included it in our 2022 bonus scheme. This augmented our preventative activities with dedicated safety measures at workstations, relying on workers to make observations about their colleagues’ workstation safety. This encouraged employees to engage with each other and relied on trust-building as a way to promote safer behaviors in the workplace by improving working habits. Our company-wide program on behavior-based safety offers different training courses to employees via a variety of routes depending on local needs. Additionally, there is an EHS training schedule as well as material that is always available via a toolbox (including SOPs, safety handbooks, videos, and other training material).
After a two-year break due to Covid-19, we also organized a Global Safety Day on all sites with a mandatory dedicated health and safety training for all our employees. Our focus was to give our local teams the initiative to demonstrate their ideas and engagement in organizing educational events that would encourage improvements in our safety culture. Health and safety days with different focus areas are organized either group-wide or on a specific site, depending on local needs. Safety plays an important role in our organization and is well-accepted by our teams. In such events, there have been safety-related escape games, virtual reality equipment used for safety education, fitness exercises and diet consultations. Getting family members of our employees involved – especially kids – in some locations extended our safety message beyond our industrial facilities.
Beckers Group has, as all companies, a legal requirement to provide environmental, health and safety (EHS) information to our customers and to ensure we are complying with the regulatory and statutory requirements in each country.
Because of the high level of detail and the complexity of the information Beckers uses one single regulatory platform across the Group to maintain all data. The system, called Intelligent Authoring, creates labels and material safety data sheets for all Beckers companies in line with current legislation and in the appropriate language. Our global regulatory team is in charge of monitoring all legal aspects related to material safety data sheets, labels, formulations, content and country specific classifications. The team works closely with all EHS teams and is also in charge of communicating all global chemical regulations to all Beckers sites. The processes in place include chemical regulatory management, documentation of rotating equipment, installation of new equipment according to EHS regulations, hazardous area classification and management documentation for contractors. New and/or expanded processes must be cleared through the EHS checklist.
Our commitment is captured in ➜ our Group Environmental, Health and Safety (EHS) Policy, our Loss Prevention Standard, our Incident and Accident Investigation and our Root Cause Procedures. All activities are aimed at making work conditions and behaviors safe. Our EHS Policy’s requirements are implemented through a comprehensive, company-wide Health and Safety (HS) Management System that includes global directives, standards, guidance documents, best practice sharing, operational management systems at our sites and continuous learning.The management system operates in accordance with global standards such as ISO14001, OHSAS 18001 and ISO 45001 and globally recognized risk management systems.
Our actions contribute to the achievement of the ➜ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) quality education (SDG 4), decent work and economic growth (SDG 8), reduced inequalities (SDG 10) and responsible consumption and production (SDG 12) because at Beckers, we take care of a safe and healthy work environment for our employees, partners and customers and promote it actively.
For further information on the SDGs click here
