High Standards for Health and Safety (H&S)
Nothing we do is so important or urgent that our people should ever work in unsafe conditions. Our Group Policy on H&S Management commits us to maintaining high safety standards and promoting our employees’ health. In 2009 we signed the Luxembourg Declaration on Workplace Health Promotion in the European union and the Düsseldorf Statement in support of the Seoul Declaration on Safety and Health at Work. We strive continually to improve the H&S culture at our company so that we do an even better job of protecting our own employees, contractor employees, visitors, and the general public. We’re committed to being an H&S pacesetter in the energy industry.
Binding Group-wide Standards and Rules
Our safety culture is based on zero tolerance for accidents. We’ve established binding safety standards and rules for our entire company and expect our contractors to comply with them as well. Generally, the occupational H&S management systems of E.ON units involved in energy production are certified to comply with internationally recognized standards such as OHSAS 18001. When we acquire new companies or form joint ventures, we address H&S issues as a matter of course. Our health management effort focuses mainly on continually enhancing our people’s awareness of the importance of health maintenance and disease and illness prevention. We intend to make health management more systematic at E.ON units so that we can address important issues across our organization. All of these measures are important components of an efficient and effective H&S organization and represent another facet of our “cleaner & better energy” strategy.
Fewer Injuries, More Health Maintenance
We aim to continually improve our H&S performance. We set measurable targets for the period 2012–15 and are monitoring our progress toward them.
| Targets | Status at Year-End 2012 |
| Reduce E.ON and contractor employees’ total recordable injury frequency per million hours of work (TRIF) to 3 by 2014. | Our TRIF was 2.9 in 2012. This means that we already achieved our target for 2014. |
| Reduce E.ON employees’ lost-time injury frequency per million hours of work (LTIF) to 1 and our contractor employees’ LTIF to 3 by 2014. | The LTIF for E.ON and contractor employees was reduced 1.9 in 2012. This means that we already achieved our target for contractor employees for 2014.The achievement of our targets in these categories was overshadowed by the six fatalities that occurred at our operations in 2012. |
| Achieve a 50-percent participation rate in health-promotion measures for employees at risk for certain health issues. | We foster our employees’ health in a variety of ways. Each year we define a health issue for the entire company and take action to address it. Owing to the numerous measures of our E.ON 2.0 efficiency-enhancement program and the resulting organizational changes in 2012, at this time we have no reliable data with which to calculate the participation rate of at-risk employees. |
H&S Focus Areas in 2012
We work to continually improve our H&S activities. As part of the changes to our company’s organizational setup, in 2012 we began the process of designing a new organizational model for the Health, Safety & Environment (HSE) department at Group Management. We also began putting in place an auditable data-collection process for compiling HSE key performance indicators. A key challenge during the year was to retain our ability to continue enhancing E.ON’s HSE performance despite a reduction, measured in full-time-equivalent positions, in the size of our HSE team. This challenge will continue going forward.
Clearly Defined HSE Responsibilities and Organization
The E.ON Board of Management bears overall responsibility for our HSE activities, which are coordinated and continually refined and optimized by the HSE department at Group Management. A number of committees work with teams of HSE experts to establish HSE standards, rules, and targets for our entire company. The Board of Management at each of our units appoints an HSE Governance Council, whose mission is to enhance the unit’s HSE culture. Specific Group-wide safety issues, such as contractor management, are addressed by the E.ON HSE Manager Group, which brings together HSE managers from around E.ON.
Over the last few years, our units’ safety improvement plans (SIPs) have helped us establish and implement safety processes and structures. In 2011 a project team consisting of experts from Group Management and selected units developed instructions for process and plant safety management that are binding across our company. The instructions establish uniform, high standards for support processes and will be gradually rolled out at our units in line with their respective risk assessment. Since 2011 we’ve set additional specific standards, particularly for our global units, to ensure implementation of, and compliance with, our Group-wide safety requirements. These efforts help ensure that our facilities operate without interruption and without harm to people or the environment. SIPs have proven their effectiveness in enhancing our safety performance. In 2013 we plan to develop similar improvement plans for health and environmental protection so that we use such plans to promote improvement of our entire HSE performance.
Revised Group Policy Promotes Systematic Implementation of HSE
We’re currently revising our group policies on HSE management to join H&S Group Policy with our Group Policy on Environment. The purposes of the revision are to have the HSE department’s organizational setup more closely mirror its management functions and to improve our ability to implement HSE activities systematically across our company. The revised policy, which will likely be adopted in the second quarter of 2013, contains a policy statement that defines our HSE objectives, underscoring our commitment to further enhancing our company’s HSE culture. Other important revisions include:
- harmonizing the requirements of, and establishing uniform structures for, our HSE management mechanisms
- embedding occupational health management in our organizational setup.
The new policy, along with the guidelines and standards based on it, describes the organization and scope of HSE management systems and the management requirements for our own company and our contractors.
