Friesland celebrates 1000 days of workplace safety

FrieslandCampina WAMCO Nigeria Plc, makers of Peak, ThreeCrowns and Frisco, last Wednesday, celebrated it success in ensuring workplace safety   marked 1000 days with no staff forced to be absent from work due to injuries sustained on duty.

In her address to workers during what the company tagged as its ‘SHE Week’ – Safety in Your Hands Hearts, and Mind, the Corporate Affairs Director, Ore Famurewa, said that the organization was now ISO14001 and OHSAS 18001 certified for maintaining the best regulatory standards for environment-friendly energy use and waste management as well as promoting the best occupational health and safety standards without legal breaches.

According to Famurewa, it is part of foremost dairy manufacturer’s policies to promote best occupational health and safety standards among management and staff.

Workers celebrating the Friesland 1000 days of workplace safety
LTA refers to an employee’s time off work as forced by an injury sustained at work during daily operations.
Speaking on the achievement of the 1000 days without Lost Time Accident the Operations Director, of the dairy manufacturer, Doyin Ashiru said: ‘The idea was born after the July 2011 Lagos Flood incident that affected our company as well as other various incidents recorded in the company. We now thought we owe it to all our employees and their families to provide safe working environment.

We then started with the dos and don’ts and gradually, we got everybody to imbibe learning to work in a safe way and then from there we got ourselves into seven rules of working safely, changing momentum and introducing new concepts to ensure there is not only leadership, ownership but also, having everyone in the safety culture. And that is exactly what we have done to achieve the zero lost time accident free-days.”

Ashiru however, said the company is not relaxing on its oars after achieving an accident-free work environment in 1000days, “We are now changing the goal post from Lost Time Accident to Zero-Injuries. We want to start tracking injury days with the objective to come up with another celebration of 1000 Injury-Free Days.

According to him: “We believe if we were able to prevent injuries, we won’t have to talk about ‘Lost Time Accidents;’ so the idea is about coming in with no single spilling of blood and no single incidence happening. It is a culture we want to build and in which everybody owe it to themselves, so we all work in a pro-active way; hence we have changed safety from rule-based to culture-base initiative by saying, safety in your hands, heart and mind.”

In his remarks, the Managing Director of the company, Rahul Colaco, said: “The achievements truly demonstrate our team members’ individual and collective commitment and dedication to high personal safety standards.”

Colaco noted: “We are proud of the high standards we have set for ourselves and the rest of the business within Nigeria. We are very proud of our employees, especially the operations team. It is a great outcome especially when you consider that during the last 1000 days, we have completed several massive construction projects.

“Therefore this is a good opportunity to celebrate our value on safety which recognises that safety is not just a priority but it is in the hearts of the people. The best part is that our families back home are the biggest beneficiaries of this safety culture”, said the Managing Director said.


This story was published in Newswatch Times on September 17, 2015.

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