A safe working environment – Zero work-related injuries and illnesses at Alcoa
In today’s business environment, companies have understood that, in order to create sustainable profitability, they need to value more their employees. The first condition for a satisfied workforce is to provide a safe working environment.
Workplace related injuries and illnesses seem to be inevitable, especially in an accident prone environment. However, companies that have long strived for reaching zero related injuries and illnesses succeeded in achieving their goals.
This is the case of Alcoa, the world’s leading producer of primary and fabricated aluminum, and the world’s largest miner of bauxite and refiner of alumina. On its website, the company made public different graphs for the most important safety KPIs, providing for some of them useful information, such as previous results, benchmarking data, current results, targets and the progress recorded by the company.
In 2013, 42.4% of Alcoa’s 184 locations worldwide had zero # Recordable injuries, 84.2% had zero # Lost workdays, while 49.5% had zero # Days away, restricted or transferred.
This performance was achieved through to a dedicated effort and commitment to the company’s values. Alcoa’s safety systems rely on its workforce, who effectively supports a safe workplace, work methods and overall production system stability.
In order to support Alcoa safety system, a series of actions have been taken. Among them:
- Assessing hazards and the risks associated with the company’s products, services and operations;
- Implementing the appropriate operational controls to effectively mitigate the impact of those risks;
- Continuously monitoring the procedures implemented to ensure they are still valid;
- Adjusting, if needed, the gaps identified in the system, to improve its stability.
Other Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) Alcoa monitors are: # Fatalities, # Employee New-to-the-Job Incident Rates and % Employee Safety Engagement. For more KPIs in this field, the Health, Safety, Security and Environment functional area can be accessed.
References:
- Alcoa (2013), Safety
- Alcoa (2013), Zero Is Possible
- The KPI Institute (2013), HSSE (Health, Safety, Security and Environment)
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Tags: HSSE KPIs, KPI, Production and Quality Management performance
