Health and Safety

Our purpose of Enhancing Society Together guides everything we do. We strive to achieve a zero incident and accident track record and as such, the protection of the occupational health, safety, and well-being (OHSW) of our employees and our clients is one of our top priorities (see also Our People for information connected to employee mental health and well-being). The robust management of our people’s health and safety is a fundamental part of our organisation’s culture and purpose and is also extended to our clients, partners and communities around the world. We foster a culture of respect, safety and inclusion, where we actively listen, discuss and embrace new perspectives, because we believe this is the basis for a successful and sustainable company.
We take a pro-active approach, embedding health and safety in our ways of working which is evident in the designs, projects and services delivered. We align our management framework with the international standard on Occupational Health and Safety Management ISO 45001:2018 for which our certification was continued in 2024.

To keep health and safety at the forefront of our people’s minds, we delivered an annual awareness programme across the company. Among activities in 2024, we reviewed and updated our health and safety policies and processes to reflect our ways of working and to embed health and safety in our new integrated management system, WorkWise. We updated our health and safety walks and talks registration and reporting dashboards and promoted their use within the company. We increased the visibility and findability of health and safety on our intranet, where we also shared practical health and safety lessons based on themes such as safe work environment, travel, site behaviour, and more.

We delivered a companywide communication plan including periodic updates via our employee platform, Viva Engage. We paid particular attention to reporting and escalating health and safety concerns and subsequent follow-up to ensure all concerns were effectively managed. We held Learning Week sessions focusing on mental health and resilience (e.g. How to keep your batteries charged and in balance). We added health and safety awareness to our Stronger25 leadership training programme. We recruited a dedicated global Health and Safety Lead from December 2024 to further guide and steer our company in embedding a proactive health and safety culture.

Collaborating with many colleagues around the world, we held local initiatives focused on health and safety, including group sessions in Indonesia raising awareness and increasing knowledge on H&S risk assessments in projects and on the very important topic of mental health. In the Netherlands, around 50 internal self-assessment audits took place to evaluate and improve overall H&S culture. And we took part in the Hey, are you ok? week with several activities focusing on social safety, inclusion and diversity. In the United Kingdom group sessions raised awareness and increased knowledge on safety in design in line with relevant construction design and management (CDM) regulations. On World Mental Health Day the UK mental health first aiders took the opportunity to raise additional awareness on their role and their support to colleagues with regard to mental health.
In Australia the team took part in the R U OK? day and held morning teas to recognise and continue to promote an environment where we all look out for each other.

We are increasing the maturity of our health and safety ethos by embedding consciously safe working, designing and advising into our culture and employee behaviour. In the Netherlands, we continued our level 3 certification on the Safety Culture Ladder in 2024. Our teams operating in the rail sector kept leading the way, continuing level 5 on the Safety Culture Ladder in 2024.

Our targets to prevent accidents were partly met in 2024 with no work-related fatalities, but with a lost time injury frequency of more than 0.10. During the year, 202 accident and incident reports were submitted (2023: 170). Over 2024, the number of reported accidents and incidents increased compared to 2023 which suggests a consolidation and further improvement in awareness on health and safety reporting. There were 151 work-related reports of accidents and incidents involving own employees (2023: 116) with the following occurrence types:
Besides work-related accidents and incidents being reported which involved own employees, 51 accidents and incidents were reported which didn’t involve own employees, weren’t work-related or were commuting.

We strive to reduce health & safety risks and prevent accidents, incidents and material damage in our own office facilities and our projects. In 2024 we set our target for lost time injury frequency (LTIF) per 200,000 workable hours to 0.10. The LTIF figure for 2024 is above this target at 0.14 (2023: 0.09).

LTIF is calculated by the total number of work-related lost time injuries (resulting in at least one day of absence) in a certain time period, divided by the total number of hours worked in that period, and then multiplied by 200,000.

In 2024, 6 lost time injuries were recorded (accidents with at least one day of absence). 4 of these were work environment related of which two concerned falling from stairs and two occurred during active team events. The other 2 lost time injuries were travel related. These concerned an employee slipping and falling with his bicycle and an employee involved in a car accident. The risks of falling incidents, team activity incidents and traffic related incidents are proving hard to eliminate. To create more awareness on these risks, lessons learned were created and shared with all employees via our internal communication channels. Furthermore, identifying and adopting risk reduction measures remains an important topic for office, event and travel-related health and safety risk assessments.

Total recordable case frequency (TRCF) per 200,000 workable hours during 2024 was 3.47. This increased considerably compared to 2023 (2.70) and is likely to relate to a consolidated and further improved awareness of and willingness to report accidents, incidents, and unsafe situations/acts.

Outlook

Following the recruitment of a global health and safety lead, we will be undertaking a review of the management of our organisational health and safety as part of our continuous improvement framework. The aim will be to better baseline our performance and culture with the intention to further simplify, automate and sustain the occupational health and safety management framework.