Here in North America and around the world, ensuring the safety of our employees is fundamental. But we also want our people to thrive and achieve their potential. Having a healthy, engaged and supported workforce, who feel valued for their contribution today while continuing to develop their skills for tomorrow, is also part of our approach. It's vital to create a high-performing organization.
With more than 168,000 employees working in our plants, service centers and offices around the world, to succeed in our aim of having zero injuries, we must build a safety focused culture everywhere we operate.
Our challenge
At ArcelorMittal, we've been on a ‘Journey to Zero’ around the globe, with the aim of achieving zero fatalities and severe lost time injuries (LTIs).
In North America our safety figures have vastly improved and are well above industry standard. We measure lost-time injury frequency rate (LTIFR), defined as the number of injuries per million hours worked that result in employees or contractors taking time off work.
We have not yet achieved our goal of zero accidents and fatalities. There is work yet to do in instilling a culture of safety across our entire company. Our new global Safety Council is making strides in training and behavior, but we are not there yet. Our training programs urge employees to practice "shared vigilance"--watching out for their own safety and the safety of others.
Our ambition also aims at eliminating potential unsafe situations through a continued focus on near misses that could have resulted in a fatality - potential severe injuries and fatalities (PSIFs) as a leading indicator. The objective being to create a culture of shared vigilance in which we understand and monitor risks and hazards, share best practices and take appropriate action at every level.
Our approach
The safety of our employees takes priority over everything. This is the culture we want to embed across our operations in North America and around the world.
We have a global health and safety policy that outlines how we work and use equipment, how we identify and manage risk, how we take responsibility for our own and others’ safety, and how we learn from accidents and near misses. To ensure the quality of our management systems, our sites are certified to the international health and safety standard, OHSAS 18001.
In addition to recording LTIs, we also track near-misses. Our ability to monitor and analyse potential severe injuries and fatalities (PSIFs) is key as it provides a deeper understanding of how near-miss incidents arise and can be avoided. Results show that sites with no fatalities proactively detect and manage twice as many PSIFs as sites with one or more.
“Nothing is more important than the health and safety of our employees.” Lakshmi N. Mittal, chairman and CEO, ArcelorMittal
Our leadership is held accountable for our safety performance through the Company’s remuneration policy. The policy links 10% of leadership bonuses – from managers through to the CEO – to safety KPIs in the business where he or she works, where relevant. And safety is the first topic in the appraisal process for every employee, irrespective of where they work.
Our annual Global Health and Safety Day includes health and safety activities and opens with a corporate safety video and a message from the chairman and CEO. Film has been an effective storytelling tool, engaging people emotionally. Our 2018 safety video, 'We choose the safest way', has been watched by more than 230,000 people and earned a gold medal at the Cannes Corporate Media & TV Awards.