In my years within the industry, I've often marvelled at the involved relationship between safety and operational success. Safety is not just a set of protocols to follow; it's the heartbeat of an organization. It's an integral part of every process, decision, and human interaction. Let's delve into various dimensions of safety and a sustainable culture, understanding why it is much more than mere compliance.
Going beyond safety rules and procedures- IIF-Incident and Injury Free (IIF)
In today's fast-paced world, safety at times can be reduced to a set of regulatory standards. However, at HMEL, safety is our core value—a deeply ingrained principle that guides our conduct and decision-making. This is the cornerstone of our commitment to Incident and Injury Free (IIF) Workplace. At HMEL, we are driving a sustainable incident and injury free work culture, a culture where we speak not in terms of statistics but in terms of relationships and people.
Incident and Injury-Free workplace is a commitment that is both personal and organizational, to create an existence absence of incident and injury. In such a culture, safety and the environment are value-based. It is a culture where everybody takes care of self and co-workers. It is about building relationships.
In an IIF Culture, people do not live and work to be in compliance with procedures or standards, instead they choose the right actions because by not doing so would violate a deep internal value and also their commitment to IIF. This initiative also aims to build sustained high performance safety leadership of HMELs’ own employees, business partners and supervisors.
The Power of Continuous Learning
At HMEL, we recognize that safety is a constantly evolving discipline that requires a commitment to continuous learning. This goes beyond periodic safety training or compliance updates. Our training programmes are designed not just to inform but to transform—to shift employees from mere awareness of safety protocols to becoming active advocates for safety. We use a blend of hands-on training, field coaching for supervisors, IIF leadership workshops. This dedication to learning empowers every member of our organization to return safely to their families, day after day.
Leadership & people engagement
Visible Leadership is one of our three focus areas to drive this culture. At HMEL, there is a site IIF leadership team. With active and mutual support this team works as a high-performance mentor team to build and sustain the incident and injury free culture within the organization. This team works and finds solutions for the adaptive challenges. Under the site leadership team there are area leadership teams. Further each area comprises of IIF action teams. These teams work on the technical challenges and are supported by the area leadership teams. A group of trained people are known as IIF champions. They work as field coaches for the supervisors and for the area action teams.
Our guiding principle:
Everybody goes home safely every single day.