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Safety and Health
What are the challenges?
While accidents and other health problems caused by working conditions may occur in any workplace, the construction and maintenance of buildings in particular pose many potential safety and health risks for a property developer and manager such as Sonae Sierra. Ensuring that all stakeholders, including contractors, employees, tenants and visitors, are subject to minimum health and safety risks improves the likeliness of an excellent health and safety record and enhances an organization’s reputation among its stakeholders. Safety and health in particular is an impact area which warrants close stakeholder engagement, as dialogue with those persons affected helps not only to identify where risks lie but also to implement adequate solutions to mitigate them.
What is Sonae Sierra doing about them?
At Sonae Sierra we are committed to the implementation of a zero-accident culture and dedicated to ensuring that the health of all our stakeholders is never put in danger. Our ongoing work in this area through our PERSONÆ project has led us to develop our strategies for promoting safe behaviour and mitigating risks in our shopping centres and on the construction sites, which we are proud to have found very successful. With the principal aim to disseminate a culture of interdependent safe behaviour through Visible Leadership Commitment, the PERSONÆ project is supported by a range of effective tools. These tools are implemented on an ongoing basis among Sierra’s main stakeholders, including employees, tenants, “resident” service suppliers and on site contractors and shopping centre visitors, across all countries where Sierra operates. They include:
- Safety Preventative Observations (SPOs), a form of behavioural audit aimed at identifying unsafe working practices;
- Safe Practice Index (SPI), to monitor probability of accidents in construction works before they occur (allowing for corrective action plans);
- Standards and procedures to enable the integration of S&H concerns through the various different phases of the property development and management process, including prior to shopping centre opening, during refurbishments, on an ongoing basis during shopping centre management and the management of service suppliers and tenants;
- Local Open S&H Committee with Tenants in each site, strongly involving tenants in continuous S&H attitude improvement;
- Emergency response procedures and drills at shopping centres, offices and on construction sites in order to ensure that the large numbers of people working at and visiting these sites are prepared to respond in an emergency in a way that mitigates the risk of accidents occurring. To this end, we are careful to design rigorous emergency procedure plans and to practice these through drills. In 2007 a total of 99 drills took place across Sierra sites.
- Internal & External Communication tools (including Safety Tips, Alerts, Quick Wins, internal workshops and presentations to stakeholders).
Through the implementation of the tools described above and through additional sessions, we provide regular Safety and Health training across all our sites. In 2007 alone, a total of 14,629 man hours of S&H training were provided to staff, tenants and suppliers.
Recently, our PERSONÆ project was recognised as a winner of the DuPont Safety Award 2007 in the category of Visible Management Commitment for its innovation and scope: in its first two phases, over 70,000 people have been involved to some degree with the project’s activities, including seminars, workshops and behavioural Safety Preventive Observations.
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