37
A.P. Moller - Maersk
Sustainability Report 2021
Acting on our Safety and Security Principles We want safety to be embedded into the fabric of our business and ensure that we have the capacity to manage risks under variable conditions. This must be enacted through leadership that engages with frontline employees and provides the support they need to make safe operations easier. Maersk’s approach to safety and security is guided by four strategic principles: • We lead with care and will improve leadership capabilities. • We learn and adapt and will build capacity to manage serious risks through controls and safeguards. • We improve our culture of learning by promoting employee voice, engagement and knowledge sharing. • We enhance foundations both structurally and operationally with simple, accessible tools and competent advice. We carried out activities within each of these areas in 2021. To lead with care, we conducted 16,790 Leadership Gembas (see box at right) where senior leaders engage with frontline employees to learn and respond to what is needed to make safe work easier.
Update on legal proceedings As part of legal proceedings following a fatal accident involving a tugboat in 2019, Svitzer, a Maersk's business, in 2021 indicated a guilty plea to the two charges the company faces, recognising that it could have done more to ensure health and safety. We continue to cooperate fully with the authorities and have implemented the findings of the Marine Accident Investigation Branch report and shared these lessons across our global fleet wherever it has been appropriate to do so.
Social | Safety and security
Connecting leaders to the reality of frontline work in this way was also the theme of our 2021 Global Safety Day, which was marked by activities across all areas of operation. To learn and adapt, we delivered a number of critical risk projects, including on lashing injuries, engine fires, vessel inspections and man overboard. To ensure we grow our business safely, we also issued new global safety and security requirements for all our landside operations and strengthened our HSSE review process for new business cases, mergers, and acquisitions. To improve our culture of learning, we continued the rollout of Learning Teams, in which frontline teams come together to analyse an incident, task or operation on which they are the experts, to establish where safety improvements can be made. By better understanding what makes human mistakes more likely, controls and safeguards hard to use, and compliance difficult to deliver, we can expand our capacity for safe operations. More robust safety governance Finally, to enhance our foundations we continued the consolidation of our HSSE organisation to deliver one unified approach to safety and security across Maersk. We put in place clear governance structures for our work, including an updated Health, Safety, Security and Environment (HSSE) rule in Maersk's central governance system, Commit, and the launch of a corporate-wide HSSE policy and management framework. In line with our transformation into an integrated logistics company, this will ensure that our new business areas build on the safety culture, insight, experience, and high standards we have long developed in areas such as our marine and terminal operations. As formal safety certification is increasingly important to our customers and other stakeholders, we will further explore certification needs and requirements through an operational and customer lens and deliver recommendations for next steps in 2022.
Introduction and strategy
Progress on ESG
Data and assurance
Learning Teams and Gembas: Key approaches to build safety culture Maersk is adopting several innovative approaches to safety practice as part of our efforts to transform our safety culture. These share a common focus on engaging frontline employees to build capacity. A Learning Team brings together a group of workers who are involved in a task or operation, to learn from them as the experts about everyday work, by discussing how the work is done, what works well and what does not, and how they adapt to make the work successful. Following up on High Potential Incidents with a Learning Team, we can understand challenges experienced and the adaptations and improvements required to deliver safe work outcomes by making safe work easier.
Safety Leadership Gemba walks present an opportunity for leaders to connect to operational frontline work. This is done by continuously visiting where frontline work takes place to learn about how tasks are experienced by the frontline experts. By stepping into the shoes of the frontline, leaders gain direct operational insights and expertise on how work is done, what challenges are faced, how workers overcome those challenges and what they need to do to de-risk their work and reach their goals easier and safer. By responding to these needs, leaders can be the difference between a safe and efficient job being done or a High Potential Incident occurring.
In front of our head office in Copenhagen, on Global Safety Day 2021, office staff tried their hand at the lashing of containers, i.e. securing them to the surface they stand on. Lashing is a critical process for the safety of both staff and cargo and to avoid losing containers at sea.
