Health & safety

The safety and well-being of our people are our first and highest priority, with the expectation that everyone will return home unharmed each day. This message is reinforced by leadership at every level of the company.

To ensure consistent and safe work practices, we apply a corporate safety policy through a comprehensive operating discipline management system. Through this system, we lay the foundational expectations of hazard assessment and risk mitigation, aligned to Responsible Care^®. Dow’s programs also include a robust Dow Occupational Health (OH) system that supports company sites, functions and businesses around the world with health information, resources, and consultation on health-related opportunities and issues.

Contractors play a vital role in our operations and, like their Dow counterparts, contractors also engage in potentially high-risk tasks while on the job.

The Contractor Safety Task Force was chartered in 2021, with an initial focus on North America and a goal to understand best practices and reinforce positive behaviors that drive optimal safety performance among contractors.

Healthy people: Reclaim Your Health campaign

Our OH group launched the Reclaim Your Health campaign in 2021 to remind employees about the importance of self-care and to share resources for employees to maintain their health. To gauge the mental health of employees, OH launched screening questions as part of their engagement with the clinic staff. As a result of the screening implementation, Dow’s medical staff was able to identify employees in need of support and resources.

Additionally, all ten of our ERGs explored elements of mental and physical well-being through webcasts. These virtual engagements especially highlighted psychological safety, which is fundamental to creating joint ownership for advancing the employee experience, addressing stressors, and maintaining or improving mental health.

Healthy culture: tracking our progress

Sites annually self-assess their efforts to maintain or improve employee health and well-being through a healthy culture survey.  In 2021, six additional Dow locations received a platinum rating, bringing the total number of sites recognized to 96.

Promoting worker and environmental safety is core to our business and sustainability strategy, and we are continually striving for improvement. The following are examples of how we identified areas for improvement and involved Team Dow in 2021.

New personal safety standards

With our proactive approach to safety, we monitor and focus on the emerging and evolving needs of our workforce as justification for new requirements and standards. Our continual review of incident trends and near-miss data displayed an opportunity to educate employees and contractors, which led to the creation of the two new standards for safe use.

• In 2021, Dow’s Personal Safety Expertise Center (PSEC) drafted a Hand-Held Portable Tools Standard that included tool design requirements and user guides to help combat incidents associated with equipment such as drills and angle grinders. The standard was tested across six sites to enhance safety education and enabled sites to replace old tools with safer alternatives. The success of the pilots proved the value of thorough standard development. This standard will be rolled out to all of our employees and contractors in 15 languages in early 2022.
  
• A new Fatigue Risk Management Standard was piloted across sites in the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2021. An impactful takeaway from these pilots came from feedback sessions, which encouraged transparent conversations for leadership to understand the cultural aspects associated with fatigue. The learnings from the regional rollout helped shape a comprehensive global standard, which will be widely released in 2022.
  

Eliminating elevated work

Audit and near miss data from 2016-2020 presented an opportunity to eliminate or reduce fall risks. As a result, we:

• Launched a Routine Elevated Work Solutions project team that created a toolkit to help identify fall risks at a site and evaluate ways to make a task safer through the elimination, substitution or addition of engineering controls.
• Conducted a Fall Prevention Blitz to help prevent fall-related incidents, which continue to present a safety hazard across the company. The blitz was grounded in a “lifeguard” approach – with all employees and contractors looking out for each other to ensure safety and immediately address potentially hazardous behaviors.

Our response to the COVID-19 pandemic continued with a disciplined management approach to safety supports employees, customers and the community. While 2021 did not bring us relief from the pandemic, we consistently communicated with employees, provided educational seminars, and advocated for vaccinations in alignment with the best medical science.