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A Message from Mercury CEO, Eoin Vaughan for EU Safety Week 2019
At Mercury, we are extremely conscious of our safety responsibilities and we are very proud of our safety performance across our business. It is a consistent approach where our safety values are non-negotiable and our minimum expectations are clear and communicated before we start each new project. Mercury, as a partner of EU Safety week, committed to further increasing the safety focus of our colleagues and teams across Europe from the 21-25 October 2019.
As a large contractor delivering complex projects across Europe, we are conscious that practical visual presentations aligned with explaining why safety is personal with our people is the most effective method of increasing safety awareness across our dedicated team. We are conscious that our safety culture is a value that can never be compromised, and as a business we know that safety culture is a cornerstone of the Mercury Way.
Why the focus on safety?
This is a question we have been asked as we expand to new supply chain colleagues and new geographical locations. We have also been informed historically “that is not how we do it here”, “safety slows us down” or “safety costs us money”.
This has led us into the positive challenge of educating teams across Europe as to answer to the real questions:
What is safety and what are the benefits of safety?
Let’s start with what safety is not: safety is not just PPE compliance, we are not the safety police with unwilling partners.
Safety is a method of designing, planning, collaboration and communicating to ensure that our team home safely every day without compromising on our values. Safety is a culture of trust in the process – the process where all works are planned and we guarantee we will get everyone home safely every day if they stick to the plan. Mercury firmly believes that in an industry of fast track projects, no project can be built to schedule if a strong safety culture is not present. Safety culture sets the benchmark and the template for all facets of the projects.
Detailed approved, collaborated and coordinated RAMS allow for certainty of schedule, allow for certainty of cost, certainty of quality, certainty of productivity. Without safety, there is no plan, there is no reference point and communication and understanding of coordination, sequencing of works between multiple teams can and will break down. From a moral perspective, Mercury do not want anyone injured on any of our projects and I believe we are unique in our focus on deviations audits.
Detailed studies in Mercury internally and compared to industry alerts has highlighted that deviations from the plan are the number 1 root cause of observations / interventions /accidents / incidents and near misses. Mercury continuously stresses to our team that we, uniquely, guarantee your safety if everyone sticks to the plan.
We ask our team to pause if they perceive there to be an unsafe act or condition present in their workplace, and we recognise and reward our team for all interventions. As part of the behavioural safety program rolled out across the group, Making Safety Personal (MSP), we focus on why we don’t want people to take deviations, how to coach and intervene, and really importantly – how to coach yourself not to take that one chance that could change you and your families lives.
Feedback on how an injury at work affects your nearest and dearest is also a critical take home long term impactful benefit of the MSP program. Safety week is every week, every day, every hour, every minute.
HEALTH & SAFETY AT MERCURY
We are dedicated to achieving the highest possible standards of Health & Safety. Safety is embedded in our DNA, it is the Mercury way – from design to construction, commissioning and handover – our safety processes ensure adequate coordination and communication to enable our projects to be constructed safely. Our team understand that by sticking to the safe coordinated plan we can guarantee that our team get home safely to their families at the end of every day.
Safety is personal and our team intervene proactively to ensure compliance day by day and hour by hour. We respect our workforce and they respect our management as an integrated team with a common goal – to get home safe each day. Through our Environmental, Health & Safety (EHS) policies and procedures, we ensure an industry leading project delivery every time and most importantly – the safety and wellbeing of all our employees.
