Created in partnership with the Helpdesk on Business & Human Rights
Siemens AG — a German multinational conglomerate company and the largest industrial manufacturing company in Europe — pioneered a new approach to promote safety at project sites in Egypt by installing modular mobile site safety parks in front of construction sites.
One of the challenges of operating megaprojects — such as Siemens’ three power plant projects in Egypt employing over 20,000 people each — is hiring and training a large number of workers. Traditional ways of educating the local workforce on the Siemens safety guidelines would have been ineffective in an environment where most local workers struggle with low education levels, illiteracy and limited safety awareness.
Siemens’ approach to address this challenge was to install mobile site safety parks, which recreate real-world scenarios by leveraging visual communication and physical experience. A variety of simulators provide site workers with protected environments in which they learn safe behaviour through trial and error. For example, a hard hat lets workers experience how it feels to be hit by a falling hammer and a safety shoe with a steel toe lets them test what it feels like when a heavy object drops on their feet. Training modules are selected to reflect the real-world situations specific to each construction site.
Between August 2016 and May 2018, over 50,000 workers had been trained at Siemens site safety parks in Egypt as part of their induction programme and as a form of continued education. When local workers move on from the Siemens sites in Egypt, they are armed with safety training and job experience, both of which improve their employability for other projects.
https://new.siemens.com/global/en/company/sustainability/safety/practical-safety-park.html