Sustainability
Health and safety
The health and safety of our people is our highest priority. We aim to become an industry leader in both health and safety outcomes. Our ultimate goal is for all our workplaces to be free from incidents and injuries.
Why health and safety matters
A safe and healthy working environment is essential for the long-term wellbeing of our people and the sustainability of our business. Our goal is for zero health and safety incidents and injuries.
Our approach
Our global health and safety programme, SafeAgri, enables everyone in our business to focus consistently on creating safer workplaces.
We have a health and safety improvement plan to guide us towards our ultimate goals of zero catastrophic events, zero fatal incidents and a 50% reduction in our injury rate by 2023. The plan has three priorities:
- prevent catastrophic events
- eliminate fatal incidents
- reduce the rate of common injuries.
This improvement plan and our approach to health and safety create steady and sustainable improvement through three key programmes:
- developing our safety culture
- developing our risk management capabilities
- maintaining effective systems and processes.
We concentrate on doing the things which make a positive impact on safety performance and improve our safety culture. Our current focus is on driving a culture of reporting, which enables us to identify and correct unsafe conditions or situations prior to causing an incident or injury.
Global programmes are a key feature of our approach, but there is also a need for a localised focus on safety issues. Each region develops an annual safety improvement plan, focused on achieving global targets as well as improving local factors that contribute to injuries and incidents.
We expect everybody who works for Viterra, both employees and contractors, to take responsibility for their own safety and for that of their colleagues and communities.
SafeAgri
SafeAgri is our global health and safety programme, focused on eliminating fatalities, preventing injuries and improving our safety culture. Through SafeAgri, we aim to bring about long-term sustainable change by giving everyone the knowledge and tools they need to create safe workplaces and to perform their work safely.
Above all, SafeAgri empowers every individual to stop their work if they do not think it is safe.
SafeAgri focuses on four elements:
- life-saving behaviours
- safety leadership development
- catastrophic hazard management frameworks
- fatal hazard protocols
The programme is implemented regionally through local health and safety management processes.
Active safety management
We encourage a culture of reporting. We focus on learning from serious near-miss incidents through sharing our findings from High Potential Risk Incidents.
We see these as opportunities to review our processes and to put measures in place to prevent similar incidents. This practice contributes to a continuous improvement in our management of health and safety.