VolkerWessels appoints all 17,000 colleagues as safety leaders
Safety is one of VolkerWessels' core values. Via the safety programme WAVE (Be Alert! Safety First!) we try to prevent unsafe situations. We have made great strides in this in recent years, but we are still too often confronted with serious accidents. To achieve our goal ('Everyone home safely every day!'), we appoint all our 17,000 colleagues as safety leaders.
Director of Safety Bas Roordink: "We see that safety is considered important, but also has to compete with many other priorities and that sometimes leads to difficult dilemmas. As VolkerWessels, we have to ensure that safety is part of everything we do and create the conditions in which people can work safely. But safety is a shared responsibility in which we need all our 17,000 colleagues. From the WAVE programme, it is important that we all take responsibility, be consistent and take action when necessary. In short: act like a safety leader."
To make this shared responsibility concrete, we have reduced the VolkerWessels safety story, the main objective and everyone's role in it to its essence, so that it fits on one A4 poster (download as .pdf in Dutch). The poster consists of three main pillars:
Our goal: 'Everyone home safely every day!'
'Everyone home safely every day!'. That is what we must live up to at every stage of our operations, at all our workplaces and every day. Whether you're on the construction side or at the boardroom table. And whether you work at VolkerWessels, at a subcontractor or have another role in one of our projects.
What is VolkerWessels' role?
The VolkerWessels safety programme WAVE helps us create a working environment and approach in which working safely is the standard. WAVE is the foundation for everything we do. We focus on three elements: showing leadership, working together and learning from each other. Naturally, you can expect VolkerWessels to provide the resources and materials to always work safely.
The role of our 17,000 safety leaders
A safety leader is a colleague who puts WAVE into practice: plays an active role in promoting the WAVE values, calls others to account but also allows himself to be called to account and takes action if necessary. By appointing all our colleagues as safety leaders, we make the responsibility concrete. In the coming period, we will further shape the role of the safety leader using campaigns and examples.