Occupational safety is a priority on Fortum’s operations. We want to be a company where employees and the contractors and service providers that work for us can come to work safely and leave for home at the end of the work day unharmed.
We believe that all work injuries are preventable when the competence and the right attitude prevails, when potential risks are addressed and when measures are taken to protect against them.
Aiming for zero injuries
Even though Fortum has achieved good results in safety management, we will continue the systematic improvement of safety towards our goal of zero injuries.
To achieve this goal:
- We make safety the foundation of all our operations
- We provide safety training for all our employees
- We work with all employees and contractors to improve safety
- We require strict compliance with laws, regulations and instructions
- We interfere if we see risk-taking and work practices that are not safe
Since 2008 the Fortum Safety Award has inspired individual employees and entire teams to commit to safe work practices. The criteria used in selecting the winners include excellent safety records, creating best practices in occupational safety, and the entire organisation’s participation in safety efforts.
A safe workplace for our own and our contractors' employees
In addition to laws and regulations, our operations are guided by Group-level requirements and safety instructions as well as divisions' and sites' safety instructions. All contractor and supplier employees working at Fortum’s premises receive the needed information about work safety.
We are constantly developing our operations: there are several different projects under way at Fortum aimed at improving the safety of employees and subcontractors.
We monitor the safety of our operations using several different indicators: one of them is the number of injuries to own employees that have led to absence per one million working hours. In 2011 there were 29 occupational injuries (45 in 2010) that led to absence. This equals 1.6 injuries per one million working hours (2.4). The accident frequency for contractors improved from 5.0 to 3.2. In 2011, one fatal accident happened to a contractor's employee. Fortum's target is to avoid fatalities and accidents with serious injuries.
Progress in Russia
In recent years we have focused on improving occupational safety in Russia. The existing good practices have been supplemented to be consistent with Fortum's practices, and some of the operations have been developed more extensively. Examples of the development targets include transparency in reporting accidents and near-miss situations, systematic training of supervisors and emphasising accountability in safety issues, eliminating exposure to asbestos, boosting the effectiveness of risk assessments, improving the quality of work wear and protective gear, and contractor safety.
Occupational safety development is a long-term effort, but we have achieved clear improvements in just a short period of time in e.g. contractor safety, reporting and accident investigations. The good safety performance continued in ongoing, large investment projects in 2011. For example, the Lost workday injury frequency (LWIF) for contractors working within the major Nyagan investment project in Russia was 1.1.