COLAS Increases Informing the Employees about the Health & Safety Matters
14th October 2022
From 10th to 14th October 2022, COLAS Group organises Safety Week for its 57,000 employees all over the world. It is a yearly event focused on learning and raising awareness about safety and health matters during work. The Safety Week will be happening in 800 construction and 3,000 production and recycling facilities in more than 50 countries. By this, COLAS Group emphasises its commitment of consolidating global safety matters and health protection measures.
The Safaty Week is to remind that besides the employees' daily effort, individual and collective measures matter and are important to be put into practice with a sole goal: acheive an environment without accidents.
It's been a few years since COLAS Group has renewed its intentions to accommodate better safety measures. Now we know that the pursuit has been quite successful one. The improvement in safety matters has very positive results, e.g. the cumulative accident frequency rate1 has improved by 17 % - from 5.69 in August 2020 to 4.71 in August 2022.
Consolidating a global health and safety culture to protect its employees and all its stakeholders is one of COLAS' eight CSR commitments. The Safety Week events organised are a counterpart of the Group's global "One Safety - Goal Zero" approach, which aims to promote autonomy, improve the comprehension of risks and adopting safe behavior acts thanks to the training provided by the Group. Over the past 3 years, more than 9,300 people have been trained in the One Safety - Goal Zero programme worldwide. In addition, COLAS signed the "7 Commitments for Safer Roads" treaty in France in December 2021, thus pursuing efforts undertaken since 1997 with experts in the field of road safety measures and acts as well as public authorities.
This year, the main topic of Safety Week was Road Safety Distractions. Probably the most frequent distraction is a mobile phone these days basically for everyone, i.e. drivers, passengers, pedestrians and also employees. Moreover, according to a report stated by the French Road Safety Commission, a mobile phone is responsible for one out of ten accidents, which is, by no means, a horrifying reality. While driving, using a mobile phone multiplies the risk of having an accident by three. Furthermore, texting multiplies it even 23 times!
"Safety and health protection are the priorities and we work every day to do better. COLAS is strongly dedicated to the Safety Week as it allows us to take a rest from our daily responsibilities with a common aim: have zero accidents," explains Frédéric Gardès, a Chairman of the Board of Chairmen and the CEO of COLAS Group.
1 Number of accidents with subsequent sick leave * 1,000,000 / Number of hours actually worked.