Dear colleagues,
2024 has brought many successes and milestones for our business, and 2025 holds promising opportunities. But when it comes to Health and Safety, we must face a difficult truth: our performance is declining. We have unfortunately registered two fatalities and several high-potential incidents around the world during the first quarter of 2025.
This is unacceptable.
We cannot continue with "business as usual." We must take this moment to pause, reflect, and act, collectively and individually. The stakes are too high. Safety is a mindset, a culture, and it begins with each one of us.
Global Safety Time Out on 28 April 2025
On Monday 28 April, we will be holding a group-wide Safety Time Out. This is your opportunity, whether you're based on site or in the office, to:
- Reflect on how we carry out our work;
- Ask the hard questions: are we running things safely, where can we improve;
- Commit to small but meaningful actions, both as individuals and as teams, to raise our safety standards;
- Create a measurable improvement plan you can track through the year.
Remember: every contribution counts. A single change may seem small, but together, they create powerful impact.
Operational, project leaders and Health & Safety referents will soon receive supportive material to animate the Global Safety Time Out on sites. This material focuses this year on compliance with Life Saving Rules. We count on you to participate actively and contribute to these sessions.
New in 2025: psychological resilience
We often talk about physical safety, but accidents can have emotional and psychological consequences that ripple beyond the incident itself. Therefore, we are introducing this year an additional session on psychological trauma and resilience, to:
- Better understand the psychological impact of serious incidents;
- Support ourselves and others through emotional shock;
- Strengthen our culture of empathy, care, and resilience.
This session will be live at the Brussels Head Office or online via our new e-Academy platform, and of course available any time, any where in replay on the same platform. You can register here. Use your Company Single Sign-On to access the platform. [For BESIX Watpac colleagues who do not have access to the BESIX Group Academy platform, a recording of the session will be shared after the event.]
The Global Safety Time Out is a moment to stop, reflect, and recommit. Let's ensure 2025 is the year we raise the bar in terms of safety.
Thank you for your attention, and more importantly, your action.
Pierre Sironval
CEO BESIX Group
