Year-on-year refinement
of our Safety policy
Because people are our most precious resource, we are particularly attentive to the safety of our workers. Proactive and open to innovation, our risk prevention policy aims at proposing the safest possible working conditions and guaranteeing the safety of our employees.
It is an approach that has led us, for example, to design and produce, in collaboration with Manulatex, a full-body cutting outfit that is user-friendly, more flexible and lighter, and conceived for both right and left-handers; also, the development of a new range of knife baskets for carrying knives around safely.
Encouraging
risk prevention actions
We encourage all original actions that help prevent risks, such as getting staff to warm up (after the fashion of sportspeople) before getting down to work, and in this way avoid certain repetitive strain injuries; reflecting on the gestures employed; and together finding solutions to save physical energy. At Presta Breizh, we also encourage our workers to be active stakeholders in their own health.
Initiatives in favour of well-being and safety in the workplace have led us to work alongside CARSAT (the retirement insurance and workplace health fund), in conjunction with our own Safety and Risk Prevention department.
Placing the safety of employees
at the heart of our strategy
Safety takes pride of place in each and every decision we make. This concern underpinned our ISO 45001 OH&S (Occupational Health & Safety) certification.
We therefore discuss with our clients, as often as possible and upstream of any work, how to go about adapting the production lines, and training and/or specifically equipping our workers. This close collaboration with our contracting clients helps guarantee the best possible productivity under safe working conditions. Our commitment leads us to organise monthly “safety and production” meetings and to put in place, following an accident for example, an action plan with follow-up (analysis, cause and solutions for eliminating the risk). This collaborative approach enables the facilities to be adapted or staff training to be improved.
INVOLVING OUR EMPLOYEES
- Pursuing our desire to optimise safety conditions and encourage healthy reflexes, whenever changes are to be made to PPE (personal protective equipment), we involve our employees in the process ahead of the changes, to ensure they are accepted by all.
What we do
in concrete terms
We ask certain technicians to try out the modifications made, and we take account of their feedback to improve them. Still with a view toward well-being in the workplace, we carry out regular workstation studies by way of our Accopeda training body, to detect good and bad practices. Using volunteer technicians, we place sensors on their joints (wrists, elbows, neck, spine, etc.) to identify gestures that may be bad for their health. Thanks to the information gathered, adequate training can be implemented to correct postures and encourage adoption of the right gestures.
Another specific feature that is indicative of our risk-prevention awareness is centralised blade sharpening. Since, in our business, combating repetitive strain injury involves addressing the handling of knives, we train technicians in the thorough mastery of blade sharpening. These trained technicians are the only persons authorised to sharpen the knives of all our employees, to avoid accidents but above all to guarantee the “cutting power” of the blade, which can be felt when slicing more comfortably through the meat. Today, through these various actions in favour of safety and well-being in the workplace, we can boast a rate of accidents at work and work-related illnesses far below the French average for our trades.