Health and Safety

Safety in Practice is a cultural revolution, a system implanted in every operational processes, machineries and activities, a journey through a specific safety management. Every year we keep counting the progress of safety measures and the behavior of the people towards safety. Our ultimate goal is to avoid all accidents leading to death, injuries or permanent disabilities and to substantially reduce our lost-time injury, frequency and severity rates. Safety begins with strong leadership and a zero-tolerance culture. With such a guiding principle, we aspire to keep all people safe at our workplaces. Occupational health and safety is one of the core values of our Company and therefore it becomes a vital component of every aspect of our work process to ensure that every person returns home as safely as when they entered into our premises.

We recognize that Safety is not just a system but a cultural revolution of people practices and operational behavior. This practice of safety is not confined to our own employees but is transmitted down to all service providers and contractors, customers and stakeholders, whether in the delivery of goods and services or other aspects of interaction with our business.

“Clean Site/Safe Site” is one of the signature programs of Safety Management. All management levels at the plants and corporate office of HCBL are responsible for ensuring Occupational Health and Safety. Using the 5S (Sort, Set, Shine, Standardize & Sustain) Tool we have made substantial progress in health and safety at work.

Being convinced that injuries, occupational illnesses, and diseases are preventable, we are continuously striving to minimize risks for our employees, contractors, and third parties by pursuing the goal of zero harm. Our utmost goal is to avoid all accidents leading to death, injuries, or permanent disabilities and to substantially reduce our lost time injury, frequency, and severity rates. In order to continually improve our performance, we manage Health & Safety through appropriate management systems. We train employees in Health & Safety issues that affect their work to ensure they have the proper competencies to conduct their tasks safely.

As a part of that every year we arrange the mock drill by Bangladesh Fire Service and Civil Defense. A variety of protective measures have been taken at our different locations across Bangladesh, to prevent the spread of the coronavirus as much as possible. These include training employees on hygiene measures, displaying posters on health measures, providing disinfectants and masks, installing physical partitions, dividing working groups into smaller teams, rostering office attendance, facilitating work from home, switching to virtual meetings, restricted canteen services, daily temperature recording of every entry, ensuring that masks are worn at all times, checking & sanitizing pool vehicles, and disinfecting offices. Oxygen cylinders and oximeters were also made available for use by our employees as needed. Arrangements were made for our employees to get tested for Covid-19. We have also provided doctors’ advice and other medical and mental support to our infected employees. We record all COVID-19 cases in the Group portal AID so that we can respond appropriately.

Any kind of hazards, incidents are encouraged to report promptly to the Health & Safety department. After the reporting Health & Safety department investigates the root causes, and ensure lessons learned are shared across all operations.

Despite the challenges posed by COVID-19, we managed to provide more than 1500 manhours of training & orientation in 2020 to our employees, contractors, and visitors on safety measures such as maintaining proper hygiene and distancing rules. Moreover, every year, we organize "Safety Week", a motivational, hands-on, and knowledge-sharing program. This “Safety Week” is a global program and helps us to improve the safety culture in the Company.

Health and Safety remains the highest priority for the Company and we are aligned with our global commitment to maintaining a sustainable result of zero fatality, zero LTI in every day of our business operations. We have been maintaining a continued emphasis on safety at our workplaces, and thereby engendered a safety culture amongst our people, including external contractors.