Occupational health and safety

GRI 103-1 Explanation of the material topic and its boundary

SFS Group’s employees are critical to the company’s success. Creating a healthy and safe workplace environment for all employees is therefore a high priority issue at SFS. Labor-intensive production operations across international production platforms, often with high material feed rates, involve production processes that pose certain health and safety risks to these production line employees.

Workers who are not employees of SFS Group, but whose work and/or workplace are controlled by the company are covered by the same health and safety policies as SFS Group employees.

The following disclosures by SFS Group with respect to occupational health and safety cover 9,047 FTEs (employees of SFS Group) as at the end of the reporting period. This corresponds to approximately 86% of SFS Group’s entire workforce and most of these employees work in a production environment. They thus belong to the above-mentioned subset of employees who are exposed primarily to the identified health and safety risks. As the number of work-related injuries involving SFS employees in an office environment are zero or near-zero, this subset of employees is excluded from the following disclosures.

In the reporting year, the total number of occupational accidents worldwide declined, compared to 2018, by 19% to 113. The total number of work days lost due to occupational accidents declined by 0.9% to 1,743 days.

New or improved safety programs such as “Integrated Safety” and “10 SFS Safety Rules” were approved by the Group Executive Board and will be rolled out at the production sites on an ongoing basis during 2020 in order to further lower the number of occupational accidents.

In order to further improve the health and safety of all employees, the ISO 45001 standard will be continuously implemented at SFS Group sites and where applicable also certified. Currently, four sites have received OHSAS 18001 certification. These sites will similarly transition to ISO 45001 during 2020.

SFS aims to reduce the number of work-related injuries by 50% by 2025, as it gradually comes closer to its long-term goal of zero occupational accidents.

Goal attainment and goal progress are initially decentralized tasks delegated to and performed by each individual site. This is under the control of both the site manager, who is responsible for the local work conditions, and the EHS manager, who is responsible for environmental issues and occupational health and safety.

EHS managers have been appointed at site, divisional and SFS Group levels. They are in regular contact with each other and enter their data into a central document. EHS managers plan and implement (corrective) measures as necessary, thus ensuring the best possible goal attainment for SFS Group.

In addition to the information disclosed in the financial section of the annual report (see financial report), SFS does not disclose any data that refers explicitly to the costs or investments pertaining to “Occupational health and safety”.