Safety means preemptive actions

“Involving everyone, allocating time, and raising concerns.” These three factors are key to good occupational and environmental safety.

“At Caverion, safety work means preemptive actions involving all employees: everybody knows what to do, and everybody sticks to the rules. When everything is under control, our co-workers stay safe, and our clients don’t need to worry,” Petri Lundahl says. He is responsible for partnership development at Caverion Industrial Solutions in Finland.

Rewards for safety initiatives

A good example to improve safety is the initiative system at Kemijoki Oy—Caverion’s hydropower client—which encourages partners’ and Caverion’s employees to come up with ideas for working in a smarter, easier and safer manner. The ideas are usually related to  the processing of oil, safety of pathways, and the prevention of repeated faults. Each initiative is rewarded.

Jari Jarkko from Rovaniemi, a machine fitter at Caverion, has been particularly active in making initiatives. “I have tried to figure out how to carry out tasks in an easier and safer way,” says Jari. “By November, I had submitted my fourth initiative of last year. It was about improving the safety of the stairs at the plant. I also encourage my workmates to submit initiatives. Of course the reward is nice, but the most important thing is to make the work easier and improve safety at work.”

1,000 safety observations, but zero accidents

Another good example of safety observations is Borealis Polymer’s and Neste Oil’s major shut-down at Porvoo Kilpilahti refinery in 2015. During the shut-down, 500 Caverion employees worked in extremely demanding conditions with excellent results. There were zero accidents and nearly 1,000 safety observations made during the shut-down.

Caverion excels at safety

Proactive procedures make it easier to evaluate the success of safety activities. The traditional safety benchmark is the number of accidents, but we also need to measure the process and people’s commitment to it.

“Clients have praised us for our activity in safety matters. In Caverion’s case, safety is not just a slogan, but the company is committed to maintaining and improving safety over the long term,” Petri says.

Another challenge is that, in safety matters, we are always dealing with people, and people make mistakes. “We need to be alert in our everyday work. We also need to have our suppliers and other partners adopt our common operating models,” Petri concludes.

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