Health & Safety: fundamentals for Artelia
People are Artelia's most valuable asset, so protecting their health and safety is its priority.
Ever since Artelia was created, it has strived constantly to integrate safety at all levels.
Health and safety are not just principles and standards that must be complied with; they are fundamentals that underpin all aspects of our everyday work and values that must be shared by everyone, at all levels (employees, partners, subcontractors, clients, etc.).
This proactive approach is necessary, and an integral part of our processes.
It is based on three pillars, which contribute to Artelia's overall performance:
- Technical resources
Good workplace health and safety results can only be obtained through substantive actions to uphold the quality of technical resources (safety equipment, tools, gear) and keep them fully maintained.
These resources must be used in conjunction with expert input from specialists and users in the field.
- Management system
The management system aims to improve our performance in the field of workplace health and safety by combining prevention policy, resources and staff within a continuous improvement approach.
- Organisation
Each BU makes its contribution to improving the system.
The HSE manager and the Executive Committee member representing the BU coordinate all the available resources, drawing on their experience of the industrial world.
Health & Safety, an everyday matter
Safety is crucial to all our activities. We cannot operate without it. The reliability and long-term viability of our company depend on it.
Because our business lines and branch offices are highly diverse, we carry out many workplace health and safety actions in different forms.
- Risk assessment
An occupational risk assessment (ORA) consists in identifying the risks to which employees are exposed in order to take pertinent prevention measures covering technical, human and organisational factors. It constitutes the first stage of any prevention initiative in the field of workplace health and safety.
Therefore, to ensure that all risks are anticipated effectively, it is our desire that all services we perform on-site should undergo a prior risk assessment.
- Lessons learned
For the benefit of all our employees, we perform a lessons learned process on completion of our assignments in order to bring out the positive points and the avenues for improvement, while underlining our best practices and building our HSE culture.
This everyday process also involves being an active member of organisations and working groups focusing on safety issues.
- Event analysis
We do not regard significant events as being inevitable; we view them as opportunities for improvement.
For this reason we have set up a procedure for analysing such events, in order to determine their root causes and take preventive measures to help strengthen our system.
- Constant communication
A safety culture must be permanent. At Artelia it is organised all year round through regular discussions with personnel and specific events to highlight our desire to make our personnel more aware of safety and strengthen their commitment in this area. These events include the annual Safety Day, which uses creative approaches and experiences to draw attention to a particular theme.
- Safety and our clients
Safety for our personnel is our priority, but we also play a wider role through the assignments our clients entrust to us. We must know and abide by their own safety requirements, especially when working on classified hazardous industrial facilities. But we must also contribute our expertise to certain phases of our assignments, and are sometimes required to supervise the safety-related actions of other assignment players, in particular during the various phases of construction.
Safety requires a comprehensive approach and synergy between all stakeholders.