Ensuring that health, safety and wellbeing is a core value in their daily work is essential to achieve the objectives proposed in this area and guarantee safe and healthy work environments.
At the end of 2019, Ferrovial’s Board of Directors approved its 2020-2024 Health, Safety and Wellbeing Strategy, which is implemented through annual plans and focused on four strategic elements: leadership, competence, resilience and engagement. By 2022, the plan establishes for each pillar:
Objective: workers inspire, care for and are rigorous in complying with health, safety and wellbeing measures.
Ferrovial is committed to the health, safety and wellbeing of its employees, and each employee must be a leader in this area to make a difference. Under this premise, the company seeks to inspire people to reorient their leadership, how they approach and enforce it. In 2022, a variety of different initiatives have been rolled out:
Objective: to ensure that teams are competent, trained and empowered to perform their duties.
The “License to Operate” program launched in 2020, which aims to identify critical health, safety and wellbeing positions, for which a series of specific competencies are defined in order to be able to perform these roles continues to operate. To reinforce this initiative, the Safety Leadership for Supervisors and Managers (SLSM) program was launched in 2022, in collaboration with Safety Futures, focus on training safety leaders, giving them with the tools to supervise safety, qualifying them to influence, advise, guide, direct and manage, and enabling them to develop basic leadership and safety management skills. This enables front-line leaders to understand, communicate and drive health, safety and wellbeing at Ferrovial.
The program is aimed at developing five core capabilities: involving people and teams, collaborative work planning, working safely in risky situations, supervising and leading, and facilitating learning through 12 missions divided into 3 sections: human performance in action, supervision in practice and personal capstone project.
Objective: Ferrovial is prepared to protect its employees, stakeholders and divisions in adverse circumstances.
Ferrovial continues to focus on High Potential Events, events with the potential to have caused a fatal or catastrophic accident but which have been avoided. All of them are reported and analyzed weekly by the Management Committee, carrying out an Executive Review of each one of them, extracting lessons learned. The following stand out:
On the other hand, the current indicators have also continued to be monitored. In 2022, 68,132 inspections and audits were carried out and 335,763 hours of health and safety training were provided. Thanks to the improvement actions implemented and the commitment of all employees, the frequency rate has decreased by 63.6% compared to last year.
Objective: to generate a learning environment that promotes knowledge sharing, innovation and effective communication.
To make the strategy effective, each employee must play a relevant role. Therefore, each employee is inspired, motivated and empowered to make a difference and create safer workplaces. In 2022, the following initiatives have been launched under this pillar of the strategy:
Workers on site for the railway network tunnelling, Murcia, Spain.
Continuing with ASAR culture “Always Safe, Always Ready”, launched in 2021, the focus has been on the commitment of leadership team, middle management and supervisors with frontline workers in the II Health, Safety and Wellbeing Week, with the claim “I’m in”.
Various initiatives were held, such as visits by leaders to construction sites, the “I’m in” campaign, a corporate calendar with a health, safety and wellbeing theme, the ASAR recognition program and various wellbeing activities.
More than 130 posts, close to 71,000 views and more than 2,000 interactions were shared on the internal channel and 41 posts, around 49,200 views and 5,000 interactions on Ferrovial’s social media channels.
For Ferrovial, innovation is a lever for change to improve Health, Safety and Wellbeing performance. The work started in 2018 on the Safety Lab has continued, to turn it into a tool that provides solutions to the challenges faced by workers on a day-to-day basis and in all work centers.
Ferrovial has a SHWIL (Safety, Health and Wellbeing Innovation Lab) program, whose mission is to help, through innovation and exploration of the latest technologies, to improve the health, safety and wellbeing of employees and all other agents affected by Ferrovial’s operations.
SHWIL includes Safework Man-Machine Interaction, which aims to prevent accidents when workers unintentionally interfere or interact with machinery on site. By means of devices installed on the worker’s clothing or helmet, the locator notifies the pedestrian that he or she is within a risk zone and, at the same time, also activates an alarm that notifies the machine operator that the worker is nearby. This significantly reduces the risk of being run over and helps increase worker awareness by having them instinctively maintain a safe distance from the machinery.
Webber has pioneered the implementation of this solution with positive results, and it is currently being tested on two different sites within Ferrovial Construction.
LBJ Express Toll Roads, Texas, United States. ©José Manuel Ballester.