On World Steel Safety Day 2020, we are rolling out the GFG Life Savers – a set of behaviours which aim to ensure all members of our extended GFG family return home fit and well at the end of each workday, writes Sanjeev Gupta.
I grew up spending a lot of time in steel mills and know first-hand how important safety is for our people and our business.
One injury or accident is one too many, and can have far-reaching consequences for individuals, their family and loved ones, work colleagues and the community.
Making sure all members of the GFG family – our people, customers, suppliers, business partners and community members – are safe is a top priority for me and one of my main duties as Executive Chairman.
Which is why I’m proud of the GFG Life Savers, which we’ve decided to launch today on the re-scheduled World Steel Safety Day for 2020.
The GFG Life Savers are a set of life-saving behaviours that cover more than 80% of our critical incidents. We looked at our critical incident history, industry trends and consulted with our global network to develop this set of behaviours. Typically, it is only 8 to 12 different risks that cause more than 80% of the fatalities and critical incidents in the mining (iron and coal) and metal industry (steel and aluminium).
As a result we identified the ‘critical behaviours’ associated with each of the 8-12 main risks. These are our GFG Life Savers and set the minimum behavioural expectations for all GFG employees, no matter which business, site or region they are working within.
A global approach to safety
The launch of our Life Savers is part of the rollout of our global safety strategy – Be GFG Safe – released earlier this year.
The Be GFG Safe strategy is based on the guiding GFG values of Change, Family and Sustainability and provides a new approach for how our global businesses and workforce looks out for each other so all members of the GFG family can return home safe and healthy every day.
The strategy provides a framework to guide the group on its mission to operate globally in a safe, responsible manner, with a focus on respecting the environment and the health and safety of our employees, customers and the communities we operate in. Given the challenges posed throughout 2020 and the continuing COVID-19 pandemic, this has been paramount for me and my leadership team. Despite the challenges, we have continued to keep our people, customers and community safe, and maintained our operations to manufacture and distribute essential steel and aluminium, which will be critical to post-pandemic economic recovery around the world.
The Be GFG Safe strategy has four key pillars to guide our way of working:
 | Preventing life-threatening incidents by understanding and managing our biggest risks |
 | Driving a safety-focussed culture where everyone takes responsibility for looking out for themselves, and each other |
 | Encouraging fitness for work and life through targeted health and wellness programs and support |
 | Enabling performance by constantly reviewing our processes and tools, promoting organisational learning and best practice, and maintaining our high standard of work. |
Our newly launched GFG Life Savers underpin the prevention of life-threatening incidents, while supporting the development of our safety-focused culture and enabling our performance.
Recently some of our people, globally, got involved in a video and shared what our ‘Be GFG Safe’ strategy means to them.
- Learn more about our approach to safety and the ‘Be GFG Safe’ strategy
