ECJ EUROPEAN Cleaning Journal

ISS, the world's leading building services provider, is launching worldwide campaigns among its employees to promote health, safety and the environment. There will be a number of initiatives throughout this year under the name You and Me. These will be promoted to the company's 520,000 employees in over 50 countries. ECJ spoke exclusively to head of HSE and corporate responsibility at ISS, Joseph Nazareth on the company's commitment.

“We strive to protect the personal health and safety of our employees, recognising that healthy business performance is delivered through healthy people and safe processes and equipment. We recognise that our success and our future require us to carry out our operations in a safe and environmentally conscious way. This is part of the ISS Way. That is why we need to have a systematic approach to health, safety and environmental management to achieve continuous improvement in quality and performance. ISS needs to manage these matters as critical business activities, set standards and targets for improvement, and measure, appraise and report on our performance”.

ISS has the objective to create a consistent approach to HSE throughout the ISS countries. To ensure this objective an ISS Group Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) Manual has been developed, which acts as framework by which each country shall develop effective HSE management to support the ISS Values, Code of Conduct, HSE Vision and Policy.

According to Joseph Nazareth however, the success of ISS’ HSE culture is dependent on every individual and every manager in the company. Each has the responsibility to eliminate their risk behaviour and that of others. In 2010, ISS initiated the development of a set of safety rules, which are intended to align behaviours in carrying the daily tasks.

In order to improve the HSE culture at ISS and to improve performance in these areas, ISS has sent a Group HSE Action Plan with specific targets and actions for each country to incorporate in their action plan. One of the actions to keep focus on health, safety and environment is the running of a global campaign under the heading of ‘Me and You’. Countries are required to develop their own campaigns to supplement the group effort in order to engage their own employees.

Drive to 100

The safety campaign is one of three campaigns ISS will run this year under the name You and Me (the others being health and the environment). The campaign on safety, called Drive to 100 Safety Campaign started in March 2011.  The Drive to 100 refers to ISS’  HSE Vision of 100:

• ISS aims to be number one in the industry and recognised as an industry leader in the way it delivers health, safety  and environmental performance

• ISS operates with 0 fatalities at its workplaces

• ISS incurs 0 serious incidents and occupational injuries at its workplaces.

Campaign roll-out

We asked Joseph Nazareth how he intends to roll out the campaign: “Material including posters has been sent from our headquarters in Copenhagen to all countries. The countries have then undertaken their own initiatives such as: translating the posters into their local languages, holding a campaign kick-off, convening safety committee meetings, convening safety forums,  holding tool box talks, writing articles in their employee newsletters, etc. In order to reach our front line employees, supervisors and facility managers were also encouraged to discuss the three focus areas through Tool Box talks and pre-shift meetings.”

What's next?

Next step in the You and Me campaign is the Global Health Campaign, which was launched in June with a focus on these three key areas:

1. Healthy back

2.Working with chemicals

3.Personal Protection Equipment.

www.issworld.com