How to reduce workplace accidents and improve operational performance?
Despite many efforts, work safety performance in France is not as expected and is no longer acceptable. In this context, Mathieu Leduc, EMEA Director of Industry & Practice at dss+, spoke to BFM Business, representing the firm as a world leader in this field. He shared insights on the opportunity to develop a disruptive safety culture and announced the initiative's goal of mobilising industrialists and public stakeholders.
Can you first tell us a bit about the dss+ company and its area of expertise?
dss+ became independent in 2019 during the "carve out" of DuPont de Nemours. dss+ relies on more than 55 years of experience as a consulting company from a world-leading industrial security operator. With 1,500 employees, we currently operate in 41 countries. dss+ combines its expertise in 3 areas: security, operational excellence and sustainability. We make our customers' industrial operations safer, more efficient and sustainable.
As an international consultancy firm specialising in safety and operations management, what are you doing to reduce accidents in the industry?
We activate different levers which make it possible to reduce accidents, whether they are work accidents or industrial accidents. The first lever concerns the level of control of the risk profile. The second one consists of developing safer attitudes, decisions and behaviours: we help our customers to develop their safety culture. Like in medicine, we quickly make a diagnosis and define the appropriate solution, and then like a sports coach, we support and train our clients to implement the solution. The latter most often involves changes in habits and state of mind.
Do you have any figures illustrating the reduction in these accidents among your customers in the industry?
The results are typically a 30% to 80% reduction in accidents in 12 to 18 months! On the other hand, how do you help your clients increase their performance? Developing a safety culture helps establish a positive climate of collaboration and more efficient operations management. These assets are transposed into the management of operational excellence and "good safety is good business" is verified in majority of our projects. Furthermore, we also support our clients on programs to improve operational excellence and sustainability. This involves implementing initiatives to improve maintenance and reliability or even energy efficiency to combine profitability and sustainability. Here too, we rely on advice from industrial operators and very experienced consultants in the industry so that the identified improvement strategies become reality.
What are the other challenges through which you support your clients today?
Achieving decarbonisation objectives requires impressive action by industries. The effective implementation of decarbonisation roadmaps requires activating the right approach but also underpins profound cultural changes with an evolution of the mindset and the development of skills at all levels of organisations. dss+ brings its expertise in sustainability, reinforced by 2 recent acquisitions, and its capacity for deployment in operations.
What will be the news from dss+ in the coming months?
In the context of the public deficit slipping to 5.5% of GDP in 2023, Gabriel Attal announced on March 26, 2024, the launch of a major initiative on accidents at work among various measures. In 2021, there were still 640,000 work accidents, including 39,000 serious and 696 fatal, according to Health Insurance figures. A poor performer at the level of the European Union, France comes 4th among the countries most affected by this scourge, according to Eurostat data for the year 2021. Over the last 3 years, dss+ has measured the safety culture of a panel of French companies through a survey measuring safety culture according to the dss+ Bradley TM curve with more than 135,000 respondents. The safety culture index measured is 43.5, down 9.5 points compared to the European industrial panel, 20 points compared to North America or even 58 points compared to the world's leading manufacturers. This confirms the major challenge of developing safety culture in France, the first action to activate to be part of a national effort to reduce accidents at work.
In September, dss+ is launching an action forum with several industrialists and public stakeholders to determine the methods of deploying the safety culture adapted to the different industrial sectors and identify the key success factors to obtain rapid and lasting results. Join us!
Source: As published by BFM TV. dss+ : « Nous sommes une entreprise de conseil pas comme les autres » (bfmtv.com)