Safety Management

Safeguarding workers’ health and wellbeing 

For Brembo safety does not mean just ensuring its braking systems’ reliability; it is also about promoting the value of safety across all its manufacturing sites. A principle that is reiterated through organised management of workplace health and safety aspects, capable of meeting the needs of all interested parties in a positive and concrete manner: employees, suppliers, public bodies and the local community. Brembo’s organisation cooperates and works to ensure that all individuals can access the work environments in complete safety.

To guarantee the highest health and safety standards for their own people, Brembo has adopted an increasingly structured approach oriented to achieving this objective. For an effective management of these issues the Group has issued a special Workplace Health and Safety Policy outlining the guidelines followed by Brembo. The Health and Safety Policy contains the principles set out in the OHSAS 18001 standard, which acquires concrete expression both at a Group and local hub level in the workers’ Health and Safety Management System, as well as in procedures and operating instructions, which are subject to external certification. The Group’s approach as part of the Health and Safety Policy entails analysing potential sources of risk for its personnel and putting the most effective solutions into place to prevent, reduce and, where possible, eliminate such risks.

To ensure the full and effective implementation of the policy’s provisions, the Group voluntarily submits to regular independent third-party audits to verify that said Management System has been effectively implemented at all the different manufacturing sites.

A variety of activities were started in 2019 to update the present Management System in accordance with the new principles defined by recent standard ISO 45001. All personnel belonging to the Health and Safety Department, after attending a training course dedicated to understanding ISO 45001, identified the new developments and procedural differences with the current Management System (based on standard OHSAS 18001) to define the necessary updates to be made to the employee Health and Safety Manual and Guidelines. Once the first draft of the new System was completed, three pilot projects were started in two Italian plants and one Polish one to verify its efficacy. The experience of these projects has allowed the Parent Company to start extending the new Management System to the other plants as well, organising a number of workshops for the introduction and explanation of the new Guidelines. At the beginning of 2020, all plants will start to implement the new Management System with the aim of achieving ISO 45001 certification by the end of the year.

Communication campaign on health and safety issues

During the year, Brembo completed the first global communication campaign on health and safety issues, "I am Safety", launched in 2018 and personally involving the employees of all the Group’s plants, proving Brembo’s major focus on workplace health and safety issues.

With this initiative, the Group raised the awareness of employees on health and safety issues through a process leading to everyone feeling responsible for their own safety and that of other people.

In particular, the Brembo Group wanted to use this initiative to:

– disseminate and stimulate a shared Brembo Safety Culture throughout the Group;

– boost the motivation of Brembo’s People to continually improve every aspect relating to their own safety and that of other people;

– increasingly improve safety performance and the related indicators (accident frequency index and gravity index), focusing attention on the behavioural causes that contribute to accidents and near misses;

– spread awareness that safety is based on principles such as responsibility, choice, personal and collective commitment and that health and safety are non-negotiable.

This communication campaign involved the people who work in the various production plants, in order to understand which main messages to convey regarding safety. Thanks to this work, the Group was able to identify common values and thinking in the world’s different regions regarding the issue of health and safety, which accompany more specific views reflecting the distinctive features and sensitivity in the various Countries in which Brembo operates. Subsequently workshops, emotional intelligence training and interviews in the Plants were organised on the values of safety in the broadest sense. To close this two-year process, 2019 saw the creation of a booklet that emphasises personal attention and responsibility for workplace health and safety, using a number of images closely linked to the large posters of the Safety communication campaign affixed in Plants throughout the World. In addition to images, the booklet includes reflections gathered from Brembo employees about the values of the Campaign and so acts as the mouthpiece for the words, thoughts and opinions of those who live their daily lives in the plants. In fact, the booklet was produced thanks to the contribution made by all Brembo’s employees to creating Workplace Safety based on listening and on shared values. It should be emphasised that this innovative Safety Campaign is also closely linked to Brembo’s Communication Campaign on the 17 sustainable development objectives, and particularly to Goal 8 of the UN’s agenda 2030 “Protect labour rights and promote safe and secure working environments”.