Member Article

Europa Leads the Way in Health and Safety

Europa Leads the Way by Investing 560 business hours in Health and Safety Training

• All operational senior team to gain industry-leading health and safety accreditation

Europa Worldwide Group is setting the precedent in the logistics sector for outstanding health and safety standards by sending 25 members of its senior team on an internationally accredited training course.

The £100m turnover business, which is this year celebrating its 50th anniversary, introduced a new set of values company-wide two years ago – one of which is to work safely and responsibly. The board at Europa has taken this value several steps on from other logistics operators by ensuring all senior team members with operational responsibility have Institute of Occupational Health and Safety (IOSH) qualifications, investing over £25,000 and more than 560 business hours (75 days) in their training.

HR and Facilities Director at Europa Carl Potter said the aim was to fully embed health and safety within the culture and DNA of Europa, by cascading the training through from the senior team members to all staff.

He said: “Our goal at Europa is to ensure that each and every member of our team understands the importance of adhering to health and safety regulations. Our sector is fraught with many potential operational safety hazards, particularly in our warehouses, so we need to be constantly aware of our surroundings and our policies need to be regularly reviewed and updated.

“Since introducing the new Europa values two years ago, our approach to health and safety has been all encompassing. For example, we have committed to sending all of our operational senior management team including directors on a three-day Institute of Occupational Health and Safety (IOSH) course. The minimum requirement is for one person in a business to hold this qualification, but we think it is important that the messages and learning from the training are spread throughout the whole team so that we are putting the policies into practice throughout the business.

“We also invest a lot of time and resource in our online health and safety compliance management system, called E-SES, which is a visible and accessible record of all of our Health and Safety compliance and also a record of each team member and the current level of training they hold.”

Europa also works with Inspire International, an external health and safety auditor which assess all of its operational sites twice a year and all of its offices once a year. Inspire also provides Europa with an internal Health and Safety Manager.

Carl added: “Over the last two years, we’ve worked to improve our overall compliance levels from average to outstanding across all sites. We ringfence £100,000 a year for our work with our external auditor because we truly value an outside perspective of our health and safety procedures. Our goal is to be the most safety conscious logistics operator, to hit our targets for compliance each year and to demonstrate our commitment to keeping our staff as safe as possible while at work.”

Europa will also gain accreditation to OHSAS 18001 by the end of Q1 of 2017, which is another desirable benchmark for health and safety standards.

www.europa-worldwide.com

@europaworldwide

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Kathryn Greenwood .