HSE

Of all our goals, one comes first: everyone gets home safely every single day, and no one is injured or made ill by working in or for AF Gruppen.

No financial result can outweigh a person's life and health. If a job cannot be done safely, we do not do it.

We want our presence to leave a positive mark on our surroundings. That is why we work systematically to limit our impact wherever we run projects. We achieve this through an uncompromising approach to safety and sustained, targeted efforts on health, the working environment and the natural environment.

Working safely, in ways that protect people's health is a basic condition for everything we do. The similar health, safety and environment requirements apply to everyone, whatever your role and whoever employs you. We look after one another, speak up if something feels wrong or unsafe, and ensure everyone has the knowledge, the conditions and the opportunity to work safely.

Our safety work rests on a simple idea: every incident has a cause and can therefore be prevented. Our objective is to identify these causes and implement barriers that reduce the risk of undesirable incidents. On every project we work deliberately to create a safe and healthy working environment for everyone.

HSE is integrated into the way we plan, carry out and follow up our work. It is built on a shared HSE model containing three core elements: risk management, emergency preparedness, and learning and improvement following undesirable incidents.

The model gives us a common understanding of the requirements and expectations in regards of HSE and ensure a similar approach across companies, disciplines or projects.

Risk management

We manage risk systematically to prevent undesirable incidents and harmful exposure, and to create safe working conditions for everyone.

As part of our risk management, we identify the hazards that apply and set out the barriers we will put in place to remove the risk or reduce it to an acceptable level. These may be physical barriers, organisational barriers or a combination of the two. Critical operations require two independent barriers, and at least one of these should preferably be physical. Every barrier is assigned an owner and a deadline for implementation.

Clear roles, common procedures and close collaboration across companies, disciplines and projects underpin all our HSE work. We are present where the work happens, we prioritise safety in day to day operations and ensures that it is safe and easy to speak up when something is not right, or when a job could have been planned or done better.

All work is planned and carried out so that no one and nothing comes to harm: people, the environment, equipment or machinery. The people who will do a job help plan it. That leads to better decisions, real ownership of safety and safer operations. HSE is a shared responsibility.

Emergency preparedness

Even with appropriate risk management, things could go wrong, hence we must prepare for unlikely events. Every level of the organisation prepares on how to handle an emergency. Plans, defined roles and regular drills mean we can act quickly and correctly when something happens, limiting the consequences and looking after everyone involved.

Learning and improvement are the third core element of our HSE model. A construction site is a busy place. People, machines and materials are constantly on the move. HSE work means learning as we go, improving and changing course when we need to.

We keep working on training, sharing experience and improving, drawing on what we have learned ourselves and on new knowledge. We use incidents, non-conformances, reports and near misses actively to improve the way we work. This makes our sites safer.

Reporting is one of our most important tools for learning and developing our safety work. Everyone on our projects is encouraged to speak up, share experience and suggest ideas that make the way we work better, simpler and safer. The point is to get at the underlying causes, so that improvements last and benefit as many people as possible.

A culture of safety

A strong safety culture, backed by good systems for learning, training and reporting, is how we make sure no one is injured or made ill at work. Systematic training raises awareness and builds HSE competence at every level. We want everyone who works for and with us to feel confident in their role and to see how they personally contribute to a strong HSE culture where we look after one another.

Learning from serious incidents

Some incidents call for more than a normal review. Where an incident is serious and there is a lot to learn from it, we carry out a formal investigation. We work systematically through what happened and why, to establish the underlying causes and identify which barriers failed. The investigation report recommends measures to stop it from happening again. The purpose is never to apportion blame, but to understand what happened and prevent reoccurrence. We share the learning across projects and companies, so that an incident in one place strengthens safety across the whole organisation.

We create with our hands, and our eyes account for around 80 per cent of everything we take in. These are tools we cannot afford to lose.

Injuries to hands, fingers and eyes have long been among the most common injuries in within AF. Since 2019 there has been a general requirement to wear gloves and safety glasses on all our projects. It applies to everyone present and working in areas where an AF company is responsible for safety, and its purpose is to reduce the risk of injury to fingers, hands and eyes.

Today, good protective gloves and safety glasses are simply part of our basic kit. We put them on without thinking, and notice when they are missing.

Protective equipment must match the job and the risk it carries. That reduces the risk of injury and helps everyone get home safely every day.

No one shall be made ill by working in or for AF Gruppen, either in the short or the long term. Taking care of the health, job satisfaction and well-being of everyone who contributes to our projects is one of our most important goals.

Good working conditions help people thrive and stay in their jobs. Sickness absence is therefore one measure of how well our health work is going. We track it closely, with the goal that no one becomes ill because of conditions at work.

To prevent ill health, we plan and carry out work with the body in mind. We assess the health risks in different operations and put barriers in place to reduce strain and the risk of injury. Harmful strain and exposure are picked up early, so that we can act and put risk-reducing barriers in place before any lasting damage is done.

The occupational health service plays an important role in this preventive work. It provides health checks, supports sickness absence follow-up and monitors the working environment and employee health. Together we work purposefully towards a health-promoting working environment, so that everyone returns home from work healthy and safe every day.

Working on our projects should be safe and well organised, whoever employs you.

Work-related crime puts people in vulnerable positions and undermines safety, health and trust. It has no place in our values or in the way we do business.

To keep conditions safe and orderly at every level, every supplier must be pre-approved before coming onto our sites. We check pay and working conditions, among other things, to make sure everyone working on our projects has a proper contract and is paid correctly.

Tools such as StartBank and HMSREG help us judge which suppliers we should and should not work with, both before and after they work for us. They also give us an overview of every worker, company and contract chain. We do not use suppliers that fail to meet our requirements or that have been involved in work-related crime.

That is how we take responsibility for making sure everyone who contributes to our projects works under safe, fair and orderly conditions.