Health, safety & well-being

Why health, safety & well-being is a material topic for ERM

The most important role for all ERM leaders is to keep everyone safe. We have company procedures and protocols to support our efforts, and we recognize active leadership as the most important element. However, it does not start nor end with ERM’s leaders – everyone has a responsibility for doing the safest work possible. If we cannot operate safely and without incident, then we cannot live up to our values. This is driven by our belief in the culture of caring about the well-being of our people, our clients and our contractors. For example, every employee and subcontractor has the responsibility to stop work if they perceive an unsafe condition or behavior.

We have a responsibility to do everything we can to assure that everyone is safe while working at or on behalf of ERM.

At start of FY21, we transitioned our whole workforce to work from home, adapting our health, safety and well-being practices to accommodate a radically different work environment. We had to ensure our employees had ergonomically sound workspaces at home, were provided with support on work-life balance and well-being and could continue meet the needs of our clients. With operations in more than 40 countries and territories, we set up systems to track COVID-19 in every geography and established global, regional and business unit task forces to virtually meet regularly in line with our crisis response plan. We developed entirely new systems and procedures for offices and fieldwork, trained people, and developed a proprietary app to track which employees are in the field, office or working from home each day. The task force prepared plans for safely returning to work and the future of work post-COVID, which continue to evolve according to the waves of the pandemic in different locations. We continuously improve our fieldwork procedures to incorporate and share lessons learned.

The safety and health of our people, and others under our control, is at the core of the way we do business. It must come first – every time and everywhere. The global pandemic has tested and reaffirmed this commitment. We demonstrated this from the early months of the pandemic when we canceled most of our fieldwork. Only when local health conditions improved and we had the proper processes and training in place did we allow fieldwork to restart. We set three targets for FY21 and met or exceeded two of them (see below). The verification rate for Corrective and Preventive Actions (CAPA) and the Safety AT ERM score are no longer among ERM's highest operational priorities, and we have replaced these target for FY22.