Award for a Vibrant Safety Culture

A convincingly strong overall picture

The Dresden-based environmental technology company convinced the jury with a variety of interlocking measures that pursue the goal of establishing safety, health and prevention as an integral part of the corporate culture. The focus of the evaluation was not on the individual measures, but on their systematic and long-term interaction. DAS Environmental Expert GmbH pursues a holistic approach to occupational safety and health protection that is characterised by a strong bidirectional understanding: safety is thought of and practised equally from the top down and from the bottom up. This includes practical risk assessments, which are carried out and regularly reviewed together with employees for all activities, operating resources and hazardous substances. Instead of traditional instruction, the company relies on dialogue-oriented safety discussions in which all employees are actively involved. In each technical team, decentralised safety officers are available as central points of contact who work continuously on safety and health issues together with the EHS and HR departments. This structured process is supported by a digital EHS platform that, among other things, transparently and efficiently maps risk assessments and operating instructions, instructions, incident and action management, as well as hazardous substance management. ‘Safety-related topics are an integral part of every monthly team meeting and are also communicated transparently within the company via our intranet, digital news posts and interdisciplinary committees. Proactively involving our employees and working with them to develop ideas for specific protective measures, such as designing ergonomic production processes or introducing respiratory monitoring systems, has greatly increased their sense of ownership of the topic in recent years. This is reflected in the comparatively low number of accidents at work,’ reports Jana Thiel, Head of Local Quality Management and EHS Global at DAS EE.

In the event of safety incidents, the 8D method is used to analyse the problem in a structured way and find sustainable solutions. In addition, DAS Environmental Experts invests specifically in healthy and ergonomic working environments, for example through air-conditioned workshops, co-working spaces, optimised floors or individually designed workplaces in production and logistics. Health protection is firmly integrated into management responsibility and includes ergonomic workplace design, stress management and regular workplace instructions. An established company health management system offers preventive medical check-ups, travel medical advice including voluntary vaccinations, subsidies for workplace glasses, exercise programmes such as the JobRad programme or the annual hiking day. In addition, there is a company canteen for healthy eating, which is run by Luby-Service, a workshop for people with disabilities. The holistic concept is complemented by company social counselling, structured integration management and flexible part-time models that enable a recovery-oriented return. ‘This award is a great confirmation of the commitment of our employees and managers. It shows that our joint efforts to establish a living culture of prevention are having an effect – and are being noticed,’ says René Reichardt, managing director at DAS Environmental Experts. ’As a result, we also achieve a fluctuation rate of under 9% and an employee satisfaction rate of almost 90%.’