Occupational Safety and Health Promotion

Occupational Safety

Numerous preventive measures and guidelines are in place to ensure that staff from both HHLA and external companies, customers, suppliers and visitors do not come to bodily harm, which is a key concern for HHLA. The company strives to continually improve health and safety in the workplace and considers this an important task for its managers. These measures are geared towards specific needs at the sites. The issues of all employees in Hamburg are represented by occupational safety committees. Key measures are evaluated at the statutory meetings of these occupational safety committees, which are held four times a year.

HHLA uses modern technologies to achieve constant improvements. For example, HHLA uses an occupational safety management system to monitor the fulfilment of its goals. In 2016, it started transferring the majority of mandatory training to an e-learning system. The aim is to further reduce the risk of accidents and raise employee awareness of occupational safety.

In order to create meaningful accident statistics, accidents at all HHLA companies in Hamburg are taken into account and recorded using a standardised reporting system. These also include accidents not directly linked to container handling (e.g. in workshops). The reasons for changes and/or fluctuations are carefully analysed in order to quickly initiate structured preventive measures. Several companies started developing and submitting paperless accident reports in 2016 in order to improve the accident investigation process and the procedure for reporting accidents to the authorities.

In 2016, there were 99 notifiable accidents (excluding accidents when commuting) at the companies in Hamburg in which HHLA owns a stake of over 50 %. This represents a decline of 10.8 % (previous year: 111).

Health Management

Together with the universities of Hamburg and Kiel, as well as other cooperation partners from the business world, HHLA is developing a Group-wide occupational health management system as part of the GESIOP project. This joint initiative on “preventive measures for the safe and healthy workplace of tomorrow” is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The project aims to systematically develop and steer existing or newly introduced occupational health promotion activities. As a result, HHLA’s strong commitment to occupational health and safety is becoming an integral part of the consistent efforts it is already making in the field of sustainability management.