Russian aluminium giant Rusal approves the company's 'Health and Safety strategy' until 2030

The Russian aluminium giant RUSAL's Board of Directors approved the metal company's Health and Safety strategy until 2030.

RUSAL's Health and Safety strategy aims to enhance all elements of occupational health, considering the best corporate practices. According to the strategy, the frequency of occupational accidents and major incidents will be at least halved at the organisation's production facilities by 2030. Targets also incorporate the complete elimination of fatal injuries and significant fires.

In order to achieve its goals, Rusal plans to improve the occupational health culture among its employees. This requires the development of line managers' leadership competencies and each employee's safe behavioural skills. Special attention is given to encouraging employees' personal and collective motivation to comply with labour protection requirements.

As part of the adopted strategy, it is important to avoid unjustified risks and dangerous actions, develop a habit of safe behaviour at work and at home (primarily a personal responsibility of all employees for maintaining safe working conditions), care for others' safety, and work together to identify and eliminate risks.

Rusal has declared 2022 to be the Occupational Safety and Health Year. All thematic events related to improving working conditions and detecting and removing unsafe factors are tightly integrated with production processes. Occupational Safety Year entails training of occupational safety officers under the Basics of Safe Behaviour Programme, improving the skills of health and safety units' personnel and the managers of RUSAL's production facilities.

The principles of production safety improvement, including the maps of step-by-step performance of operations, primarily at the most traumatic sites, and procedures for interaction with contractors, are being reviewed and improved across several areas throughout this year. The introduction of a workplace safety culture where the personal efforts of every team member add up to well-coordinated teamwork is facilitated by new motivational mechanisms and regular training, video content, visual demonstration models, etc.

Evgenii Nikitin, the General Director of RUSAL, said, "At the moment, we are at the safety culture stage, which can be called 'dependent' – during this stage, personnel's occupational safety depends on numerous external factors, a large number of regulations, instructions, policies, and continuous control by management.

"Rusal's goal is to achieve an 'interdependent' approach to occupational safety when the environment at the workplace and in the team would encourage employees to focus on best practices and truly care about the life and health of everybody who comes to the workshop, on-site or office. Our 2030 Health and Safety strategy is designed to deliver this important goal."