Health, Safety & Wellbeing

Aurecon believes that engagement is the key to improving health and safety.

From our CEO through to individual employees working on site, we are committed to health and safety as a way of being, not just something to comply with. Your safety is incredibly important to you as an individual, but it is also incredibly important because people depend on you. Your partner, children, parents, siblings, friends and even your pets all depend on you to keep yourself safe so that you can continue to be there for them.

By remembering the true reason as to why health and safety is important, Aurecon employees are proactive in keeping themselves and their colleagues safe. The concept ‘Because people depend on you’ is more than a slogan, it is a call to action that empowers our employees to take time to do their work safely and stop any unsafe acts or work. We take our humanistic approach to health and safety to our clients and joint ventures, including our culture as well as our tools, knowledge and competency.

The health and safety of employees covers both physical health as well as mental health. In 2015 Aurecon launched the Mind Matters programme in Australia and New Zealand to improve awareness of mental ill-health and in turn help to reduce mental health stigma. As of 2018 the programme now operates internationally. 

At Aurecon, our leaders are our role models who are constantly seeking ways to lead, demonstrate and communicate positive safety behaviours. They inspire and challenge our people to continuously improve, knowing that people depend on them. This is our commitment to our employees, our clients and the communities in which we operate.

We underpin our strong culture of health and safety with a detailed, targeted and responsive health and safety governance framework and management system.

Through application of our health and safety management system, our goal is to:

• Provide a safe and healthy work environment for everyone associated with Aurecon
• Provide practical tools and techniques for use in the assessment and consideration of health and safety issues across all work we undertake
• Provide expertise and resources to implement and maintain our health and safety policies, standards and procedures
• Provide health and safety management processes to anyone working on an Aurecon project to assist in:  
  
  
  • eliminating hazards
  • preventing incidents  
  • assessing, managing, controlling and reducing risk  
  • comprehensively managing injury and rehabilitation  
  • promoting health, safety, well-being and continual improvement

We are proud to share our internal health and safety campaign - a call to action that empowers our employees to take time to do their work safely and stop any unsafe acts or work

Aurecon's My Life Saving Rules programme

The health, safety and wellbeing of our people is paramount. We want to equip our people with the skills and knowledge to undertake their work safely. Aurecon is a diverse business operating in many different environments across the globe, from offices to construction sites, from cities to farmland to operational facilities. Following an assessment of our biggest health and safety risks, we developed My Life Saving Rules to provide our people with the critical controls they must have in place to keep safe when undertaking high risk activities. This includes looking beyond the traditional construction risks, which is why we have included everyday issues like driving, working alone and mental health.

Co-creation was the key to us developing a programme that would resonate across the entire organisation. By working with our delivery and support teams, we were able to better understand the risks they are exposed to and the controls that would reduce those risks. The programme truly has been designed by our people for our people.

What do My Life Saving Rules represent?

• My Life Saving Rules describe critical controls that must be in place to help our people work safely when working with high risk activities and environments
• Our people are both empowered and expected to adopt them
• They are not optional
• As part of our Health & Safety Management System, they offer a clear message on how to manage these health and safety risks

We make Health and Safety a way of being by remembering that you keep yourself safe not only for you, but Because people depend on you. Achieving this requires personal ownership, good foresight and work planning, and the courage to step in as soon as you see something, or where a situation has the potential for harm.

Recent Achievements

Each Aurecon region has a health and safety representative that works with management to achieve our ultimate goals of incident and injury free work environments. 

Injury frequency rates across the geographies Aurecon works in

(Click on image to enlarge)

Proactively managing health risks

Working in diverse geographies, our employees sometimes face exposure to high-risk diseases, natural disasters and political instability.  We carefully manage the health, safety and security of our employees working in these locations through the following initiatives:

• Our Project Risk Assessment Process (PRAP) involves assessing any health, safety and country-related security risks during the pursuit stage of project opportunities.  Any such risks are monitored throughout the delivery of the project and planned mitigation actions updated as appropriate.
• Travel reservations are made via Aurecon’s in-house travel management company, in order to activate relevant travel insurance. This also ensures emergency evacuation processes are activated, in the event of a medical emergency.
• Employees are informed of health, safety and security issues via email/sms alerts provided by the International SOS alert centre, open for assistance 24 hours a day.
• Employees travelling to high risk areas are required to contact the country managers ahead of the trip for up-to-date guidance around preventative measures, together with medical consultations to manage health risks appropriately.
• A Travel Advisory Guideline document is given to everyone travelling to African destinations excluding South Africa. This contains relevant information on the management of Ebola, Malaria, Tuberculosis (TB) and Cholera situations, among others.

Safe design

Aurecon believes in bringing ideas to life to protect workers and their communities, reduce environmental impact and sustain our client’s assets through human-centric design. By imagining what is possible, we partner with clients to effectively identify, assess, eliminate and manage risk throughout the lifecycle of the asset. Aurecon as a designer is committed to the health and safety of all people involved in various parts of the project lifecycle. Safeguarding people and the environment is vital and in doing so we go beyond compliance to provide a better, safe and sustainable future. 

Key parts of our approach are the concept of safe design consultation with project stakeholders and minimum requirements internationally that require all projects to create a safe design register and communicate hazards that have not been eliminated to the client at completion of our services. 

As part of our continuous improvement process, Aurecon has reviewed the Safe Design Methodology, training framework and tools. Our new materials cover all the enhancements and align with current legislative requirements.