Occupational Health and Safety (OH&S)
At ATC Nigeria, Occupational health, safety and well-being of our employees and everyone who does business with us is priority and a very significant tool of our business success. ATC Nigeria is committed to providing and maintaining an accident free, safe, and healthy workplace, ensuring the health and safety of employees, vendors, contractors, visitors, and communities where we do business. With a big focus on Goal Zero Accidents and Incidents, we take necessary measures to institutionalize controls for all risks, minimize and mitigate the impact of our activities and ensure all operations are carried out within the strictest safety standards and requirements. The approach is guided by the following principles:
- Building a positive OH&S organizational culture.
- Leadership Commitment and involvement.
- Stop work, task or operation if a concern or question regarding a Health and Safety risk is suspected or found.
- Hazard identification and Near miss reporting.
- Adoption of globally acceptable Occupational Health & Safety Management standard (ISO45001:2018).
- Effective consequence management system that addresses compliance and a reward system to encourage safe practices and behaviors.
- Compliance with applicable regulatory requirements.
- Operational controls monitoring and enforcement of safe system of work.
Our Commitment to Health and Safety
ISO 45001: 2018 Implementation
ISO 45001 is the new occupational health and safety management system standard created by the International Organization for Standardization in March 2018. ATC Nigeria has adopted the Management System (MS) to guide health and safety implementation, support the business performance, provide a framework for the organization to manage risks and opportunities to help prevent work-related injury and ill health to workers, and drive continuous improvement across its operations.
Health and Safety Culture:
At ATC Nigeria, we are committed to creating an effective health and safety culture embedded with continual improvements. We motivate our people towards adopting positive health and safety attitudes across all business functions. These strong health and safety ethos built over the years has resulted into a consistent rise in our productivity rate with excellent safety performance indices. Specifically, our health and safety team possess proven skills, apt knowledge, right confidence and quality experience essential for managing our growing clientele base while sustaining the precious organizational values.
Our Approach to Health and Safety
Building and nurturing a strong health and safety culture remain our priority. To achieve these objectives, we ensure that:
- Every level within the organization has a list of defined health and safety responsibilities, containing the policies, goals and plans for promoting the safety culture
- Every employee knows his/her assigned safety responsibilities
- Adequate resources are provided to ensure every business area achieve its health and safety responsibilities
- Co-workers resolve to look out for each other’s safety
- Every employee determines to always work safely, even when not supervised
- Every employee feels able to challenge unsafe behavior(s)
- Health and safety communications to employees are done via appropriate communication channels that suit the respective workforce demographics
- Satisfactory Training Needs Analysis (TNA) is conducted to facilitate the provision of pertinent Health and Safety trainings which addresses the actual deficiencies/concerns of employees
- A chain of command is established to ensure supervisors are held accountable for being responsive
- Every employee appreciates the importance of reporting hazards first and near misses
- Every incident is thoroughly investigated in a timely manner. Root causes are identified, and lessons learned communicated to all employees
Managing Occupational Health and Safety Risks
At ATC Nigeria, we incorporate international best practices into our approach to effectively manage all identified operational hazards with a view to controlling every significant occupational health and safety risks to “as low as reasonably practicable (ALARP)”. Generally, the under listed are the major risks associated with our operations and how they are efficiently managed:
- Working at Height: Our core function as a telecommunication infrastructure provider entails the erection of towers and rooftops for our clients (mostly telecom service providers) to place their antennae. To ensure safe work practices at height, regular trainings are conducted for our people including contractor employees on the “Safe Systems of Work”. The risks associated with their job as well as the control measures required to effectively manage them are consistently discussed. Adequate investments are maintained to acquire appropriate fall-arrest and other essential personal protective equipment from globally recognized suppliers. Entry to sites are strictly controlled, while employees and contractors who violate any of the established “Standard Operating Procedures (SOP)” are penalized accordingly. Over the years, there had been no major incident related to work at height.
- Excavation and Underground Laying of Cables: This is another major inevitable activity in our operations. As we continue to expand our coverage across Nigeria, the amount of excavation works undertaken to prepare site foundations and to lay or maintain underground cables have increased. Consequently, the risks of injury or death posed by trenches collapsing during excavation are controlled by ensuring that all our staff and contractor employees abide by approved safety plans and control measures.
- Electrical Works: We ensure that only competent personnel are permitted to work on any of our electrical equipment. Relevant health and safety trainings are regularly provided for concerned employees to enable them proactively recognize hazards and appropriately implement required control measures. We ensure every electrical equipment installed in our facilities is fit for its intended purpose, without compromising effective quality control and supervision. We ensure necessary isolation of energized systems during maintenance. Electrical safety audit is also conducted at scheduled periods to support operational efficiency.
- Safety on the Road: We facilitate mandatory training on defensive driving techniques for every employee required to operate a vehicle on behalf of ATC Nigeria. Alcohol/Drug abuse policy and regular preventive maintenance of vehicles are enforced, while speed-limiting device is installed in all company vehicles. Although, the control of other external factors such as adverse weather conditions; bad roads; traffic situations; attitudes of other road users; among others are not directly under our control, nonetheless, we still ensure regular re-orientation of our drivers on the need to maintain sanity on the roads.
- Contractors and Customer’s Management: Significant number of tasks which constitutes greatest risks in our operations are undertaken by our contractors, our direct clients and/or their vendors. Their employees work on towers and other equipment associated with deployment and maintenance of their networks. We communicate our health and safety requirements in clear terms to their Senior Management Teams and/or Chief Executive Officers demanding their utmost commitment to our health and safety policy and procedures. We encourage them to pay attention to immediate resolution of every operational challenges as may be identified by our team of experts from time to time. In addition, we operate a “STOP WORK” policy and consequence management system, which empower us to suspend or terminate the contracts of any contractor or its sub-contractor who persists on failure to comply with our standards.
