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Safety at work

As we see it, safety goes beyond insisting that people obey rules and regulations. Our safety initiatives are about developing, learning, and capacity-building. This is why we engage and urge all our employees as well as our partners working on UPM premises not only to conform to our safety requirements but also to proactively develop best practices and improve our safety culture.

As an example, we encourage everyone to report deviations, positive safety observations and near-misses to serve as learning material for the future.

We carry out systematic hazard identifications and risk assessments to offer us insights into our risks and opportunities so that we can focus and optimize our safety efforts. We share this information openly across the company via our on-line safety management tool to help avoid future incidents. Risk assessments are carried out by expert cross-functional teams experienced with the task, activity, process or area being assessed. Any identified risks are addressed immediately with adequate control measures keeping focus on hierarchy of controls. Risk assessments are reviewed periodically or whenever new information comes to light. We’re prepared for emergency situations based on the risk scenarios and our employees train to act in those situations regularly.

We systematically analyse our performance and identify lessons learned from incidents, near misses and audit findings. Our cross-functional teams investigate safety incidents and near misses to identify any potential underlying causes and define corrective actions and effective control measures to prevent a similar incident from recurring. In 2024 our most common causes for accidents were slips, trips and falls followed by accidents caused by use of hand tools.

All our businesses are dedicated to consistently improving safety in all our operations. Our company-wide proactive mindset is fostered by regular management reviews, exemplary leadership and multidirectional feedback. To monitor how we are doing, we set ambitious annual safety performance targets and track our safety performance using a comprehensive set of safety metrics. These metrics include a variety of proactive safety KPIs focusing on involvement and continuous improvement.

The safety training needs of our workers are assessed based on input coming from safety committees, proposals from workers or management, audits and incident investigation findings, legislation changes, changes in processes, etc. A training plan is then drafted and relevant trainers are identified. Trainers can be in-house experts or external specialists. Safety training can take the form of e-learning, classroom sessions, hands-on training, or a combination thereof.

New employees and contractors receive a general UPM safety induction and detailed safety training focusing on specific risks at their workplace.