Protecting employees and stakeholders

Overarching aim and objectives

We aim to safeguard the Health and Safety of our staff and partners, and ensure that the business is led by effective planning and decision making. Our objectives are:

• Protect the health and wellbeing of our people, their families, our stakeholders through medical preparedness, awareness and training
• Maintain business activities through continuity planning and proactive supply chain management
• Protect and strengthen long term relationships with our partners and the communities in which we operate

The Eastern Canada and Western Canada Business Resilience Teams (BRT)

n early January 2019 we mobilized Business Resilience Teams a country wide level to meet this challenge. They put in place their expertise in HR, Health & Safety, Communications, Operations, Procurement, IT, Legal, Compliance, Security and Resilience to provide monitoring, guidance, advice and reporting on the preparedness of our country organizations. The country Teams are coordinated by the Group Business Resilience Team. Our country organizations prepare their response using a four alert level Trigger Action Response Plan (TARP), with specific actions at each deteriorating alert level. Our Teams are accountable to comply with their national health regulatory requirements and the execution of central guidance on a risk basis.

Our global and local measures

We have put in place a range of global and local measures are in place to protect our teams and contribute to the containment of the disease. These measures include:

• Strict adherence to social distancing in operations and our offices
• Adaption of our Health and Safety guidance for all our operations in relation to COVID-19
• Creation of company-wide COVID-19 online resource center available to all our employees
• Global and local webinars for employees on keeping themselves and their families safe
• Local employee support programs and global webinars for mental wellbeing and resilience with access to remote counseling services (phone and digital access)
• Travel restrictions and work-from-home arrangements wherever possible
• Strong promotion of digital (i.e., ‘contactless’) initiatives in our markets including tools such as ConcreteDirect, available across Canada
• Clear metrics to measure the readiness of all our countries in respect of the protection of our employees and contractors while on our site

All these measures have been added to our standing practices to enforce and incentivize Health & Safety and safe business practices in the face of the Corona-crisis. We are constantly monitoring and adapting our approach for each province, carefully following developments as well as the instructions of local health authorities to help in every way we can.

Awareness and information for all employees across Canada

The Coronavirus global and Canadian intranet pages are continuously updated with additional materials and guidelines. The material includes:

• Webinar for all employees
• Posters & toolbox talks (basic hygiene measures, wash hands, use of face masks…)
• Site recommendations (operational readiness checklist, minimum safety requirements...)
• Communications and support provided to our business partners
• Patient contact register
• Business Resilience-related plans (scenario risk cards, exercise, ...)
• Meeting assessment template
• FAQs with practical scenarios and questions

We also issue a daily communication to all Canadian employees with updates on operations as well as tools and suggestions to maximize working from home, managing stress and anxiety, provincial self assessment guidelines, and to facilitate access to the leadership group during this time.