Employee Safety
The safety of our employees is what is most important, and we believe that all injuries are preventable.
COMMITMENT TO SAFETY
Safety has deep roots in NextEra Energy's culture. We constantly strive to be role models within our industry and encourage our employees to keep safety top of mind. We are committed to maintaining a safe work environment and create an inclusive safety culture where safety is everyone’s job. Evidence of our ZERO Today! philosophy that all injuries are preventable can be found throughout our company. We hold ourselves accountable to take action to prevent injuries at all times. In 2020, we achieved our best safety performance ever, reflecting an 82% improvement in the last 15 years. Gulf Power had its best lowest Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) recordable rate in company history in 2020, which is a 93.5% improvement since year-end 2018.
Did You Know?
We encourage an inclusive safety culture in which safety is everyone's job.
Did You Know?
We maintain a very active online safety network where employees can post safety discussion questions, access a library of company safety material and more.
Did You Know?
We encourage a focus on safety both at work and at home.
How We're Improving our Safety Performance
- We educate employees on safety risks through meetings and communications, and we share best practices for risk mitigation.
- We encourage employee observation programs to identify injury risks in the field, leading to focused injury-prevention countermeasures.
- Our Safety Activity Management system captures all information on injury events, unsafe conditions and near-misses. This information then drives a heightened level of safety responsibility and prevention among employees, supervisors and managers.
- We perform baseline hazard assessments at each work location to identify risks and mitigation strategies. These routine, periodic assessments and inspections ensure corrective measures are developed for newly identified hazards.
- We train employees on advanced incident investigation techniques and root cause identification software. The software helps determine employee, management and system failures and then prompts the user to identify and assign appropriate countermeasures to address the risks.
- We benefit from safety committees made up of both bargaining and nonbargaining employees as well as an Executive Safety Council that review and address our work-related injury risks.
- We require all nonbargaining employees to include at least one safety goal as part of their annual performance objectives.
- We train our employees on peer-to-peer coaching to successfully address unsafe behaviors before an injury event or near-miss occurs.
- Numerous NextEra Energy locations participate in the Voluntary Protection Program (VPP) of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Currently, 28 of our work locations have received an inspection from OSHA and recognition as a VPP Star Site.
SAFETY CONTRACTS
At NextEra Energy, our safety focus permeates all 11 collective bargaining agreements within our family of companies. Specific provisions address:
- Safety equipment.
- Hazardous working conditions.
- Joint company-union involvement in the development of safety standards.
For example, the agreement between FPL and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers System Council U-4 has a detailed company-union program including:
- Local Joint Advisory Safety Committees.
- Business Unit Joint Safety Committees.
- A Corporate Joint Safety Committee.
The agreement also includes a comprehensive program for serious incident investigations using a specially trained union-management team.
We're committed to maintaining a safe working environment, including using suppliers with a demonstrated commitment to safety. In general, suppliers who have a presence on company premises of 30 or more cumulative person-days within 12 months are required to comply with the requirements of NextEra Energy's Supplier Safe and Secure Workplace policy. Suppliers are expected to demonstrate an experience modification rate (EMR) for safety purposes that's equal to or better than average for their industry. An EMR is a ratio that indicates how a company's workers' compensation losses compare to those of other companies with similar classifications. We maintain specific guidelines for the implementation of these goals and invoke them as requirements within contractual agreements with our suppliers.
Interested in joining our team? Visit NEE.com/careers.