Blog: Leading with Care for a Safer APM Terminals – by CFO, Katja Otten

Global Safety Day across APM Terminals and all A.P. Moller – Maersk businesses took place this week. On this day we take a moment to reflect on how we can make our work environment even safer and how we can change our behaviours, attitudes and actions to strengthen our safety culture even further.

This year’s Global Safety Day’s theme is “Leading with Care”, which not only reflects everybody’s responsibility for the safety of our people and operations, but also the specific times we are living in. We observe once again a year to a large extent marked by the pandemic, when people are looking at safety from a yet another perspective. The focus on safeguarding undisrupted operations in our business has become even more apparent, with COVID-19 posing a threat of port closures on a scale unknown before.

Global Safety Day 2021

“With the pandemic becoming “the new normal”, we need to ensure that our facilities can continue to operate safely.”

One example is what we have recently seen in China, where closing the operations in one major port has had a ripple effect on the whole world. Ports and terminals are therefore implementing additional safety measures, even better contingency planning and training of staff to minimise the risk of infection in order to continue to run operations safely, keeping the supply chains moving.

While the outside world now realises the importance of safety in terminals, as infections can impact the continuity of operations and supply chains and thus affect end consumers, at APM Terminals our focus on safety hasn’t changed and we are simply deploying additional measures to make sure they are adequate in current circumstances.

For us safety is and has always been absolute priority. Health and safety of our staff is non-negotiable and with the pandemic becoming “the new normal”, we need to ensure that our facilities can continue to operate safely in different geographies.

We are doing our utmost, in collaboration with partners, to make sure our staff have access to vaccines, regular testing and medical support in case of illness. We have also implemented stricter separation of staff on different shifts, strict social distancing, and other physical measures to minimise risk.

“This pandemic is “just” another component of safety we are taking into consideration, while our focus on all other safety aspects remains equally strong.”

None of our facilities so far had to stop operations due to COVID-19 and our goal is to always remain fully operational, while at the same time protecting our people. Let us not forget that this pandemic is “just” another component of safety we are taking into consideration, while our focus on all other safety aspects remains equally strong, and “Safer” being one of the three pillars of our strategy.

Over the years we have developed a safety culture where our staff and collaborators take ownership of safety and can feel empowered to take needed actions for improvement. Safety is our joint responsibility and using this opportunity I want to show my deepest appreciation for all our colleagues around the world for continuously raising the safety bar higher!