4 minute read
Employee relations and labour rights
Safety and security
A.P. Moller - Maersk (Maersk) provides jobs for 95,000 people in over 130 countries. It is our prime responsibility to keep them safe and free of harm while they perform their work duties at sea, in the air, in terminals, warehouses and offices. For this reason alone, safety and security is one of three core commitments in our ESG strategy.
Keeping our employees safe from harm means that we must work to eliminate fatalities and life-altering injuries and strive for as few lost time injuries as possible associated with our operations.
Leading the drive to improve safety
We firmly believe that to drive progress, the performance indicators we track must focus on the diligent implementation of robust processes and actions that lead to building the safety culture necessary to keep employees safe and secure. Backed by research, we find that driving change towards an improved safety culture cannot be achieved by setting zero-targets. Such targets are known to incentivise behaviour that is not conducive to open and trust-based environments that report and learn from safety risks and incidents. In other words, work environments that have the capacity to fail safely, meaning that even if accidents or incidents occur, our safety culture, processes and mitigating actions have the strength needed to ensure that no significant harm occurs.
For safety and security, our ESG strategy therefore sets out targets towards 2023 on leading indicators for safety capacity. Reaching these targets requires us to invest and commit resources to building leadership capabilities and improving our safety culture: • We focus on High Potential Incidents as predictors of where there is a heightened risk of fatal and life-altering accidents. We are rolling out the use of Learning Teams across the entire organization, with an overall strategic target of ensuring that by the end of 2023, all
High Potential Incidents will trigger a frontline
Learning Teams follow-up to enable leaders and the frontline teams to learn from and prevent
similar incidents in the future. See box on p. 37 for more on Learning Teams and other key safety concepts. • The second strategic target is that by the end of 2023, Maersk’s entire global leadership (Top 900 leaders) will have gone through comprehensive training in the Maersk Safety and Security
Principles that form the core of our approach to safety and security, enabling leaders to champion and effectively take on the critical responsibility to ensure that we are doing everything we can to make safe work easier.
Loss of life sadly remains a risk
To our great distress, four persons lost their lives while working for us in 2021. We can never bring families and friends back to their loved ones, but as a company we have a solemn obligation to learn from these tragic events. We will continue to work to eliminate the factors and behaviours that lead to such fatalities and life-altering events.
Fatalities in 2021
In 2021, we tragically lost four colleagues in our fleet and landside operations. Action has been taken in response to each incident across our global operations.
Business segment Location Description and learnings
Logistics and Services Benin
Logistics and Services Tanzania A sales executive fell to the bottom of an unmarked, faulty elevator shaft at a customer location, and died from his injuries. We have revised the customer visit safety protocol.
A security guard in a Maersk depot was fatally hit by a truck operating on the site. We have enhanced focus on man-machine separation in our land-based operations.
South China Sea A seafarer disappeared from a Maersk container vessel overnight and was presumed lost at sea. A four-day rescue operation including five Maersk vessels was not able to locate the seafarer. We have carried out a major project to improve procedures and safety equipment on board vessels. Improvements include life vests with electronic tracking.
Weser River, Germany A seafarer preparing the gangway for arrival was pulled overboard as it came loose from its stowed position causing the victim to fall overboard. Despite intense search and rescue efforts by six vessels and a helicopter, the seafarer could not be found. Follow-up on this incident was included in the above-mentioned project.
Employed by
Maersk
Third-party contractor
Maersk
Maersk Why it matters
Safety and security at work is a basic human right, and we have a duty of care for employees and anyone operating on our sites, whom we must keep safe. It is a Core Value and an ethical responsibility for us as a company towards our employees, their families and communities.
Ambition
We ensure everyone gets home safe by preventing fatal and life-altering incidents.
8.8
Targets
2021
Leading indicator targets for building safety capacity set for: • Learning Team activity (to be completed within 40 days of every
High Potential Incident) • Leadership gembas (to be carried out according to plan) • Critical risk projects (on-time and onscope delivery)
2023
• 100% High Potential Incidents trigger frontline Learning Teams • Global Leadership (Top 900) upskilled in Maersk Safety & Security Principles