Employee Safety
We work to create a global workplace environment where people can work safely, stay healthy and live productive lives. Safety is at the forefront of our strategic goals and metrics, with visible commitment and support of leadership.
We believe the best way to drive a culture of safety excellence is to create an environment where each person and team is accountable for their own safety and the safety of those around them. Additionally, we nurture a culture of learning that enhances safety through training and experiences.
Safety at Caterpillar is led by both management and employees. From practical experience, our employees can create and champion their own safety improvements. We provide every employee, including newly hired employees, with knowledge to perform their jobs safely, and leaders regularly receive training on safety principles and set an example for a strong safety culture. These actions help us manage risk while creating a culture focused on learning, speaking up and protecting those around us.
We track enterprise metrics and targets as well as individual business unit goals. Consistent enterprise targets create structure and accountability, while business unit strategies focus on safety culture to create opportunities for continuous improvement. We drive clear accountability with our EHS management system, which establishes expectations for each facility worldwide.
The Journey to 2030
We aspire to prevent all injuries and will further our industry-leading safety results by reducing recordable injury frequency (RIF) by 50% from 2018 to 2030.
25%
improvement in RIF from 2018
Progress includes:
- Developed a refreshed safety strategy to strengthen our focus on preventing serious injuries. We benchmarked with safety thought leaders and other global companies to continue our learning around Human & Organizational Performance (HOP) principles.
- In 2023, recorded our best year on record for recordable injury frequency (RIF) and lost time case frequency (LTCFR).
Safety Performance
The strong safety culture at Caterpillar today represents a journey that started two decades ago when we made recordable injury frequency (RIF) a global metric and safety part of our company strategy.
Since then, our safety programs have evolved as part of Caterpillar’s continuous improvement efforts. To drive workplace safety to an even higher level, we have a goal to deliver a 50% improvement from our 2018 performance by 2030. To help achieve this goal, in 2023, our safety team worked on a refreshed safety strategy.
The work included benchmarking with safety thought leaders and other global companies on similar journeys. Many of the learnings aligned with the Human & Organizational Performance Principles or HOP. HOP is an operating philosophy centered around how humans and organizations interact to accomplish work and understand the context and conditions of work.
Our resulting refreshed safety strategy builds on Caterpillar’s existing safety strengths and focuses on three key outcomes:
- Preventing serious injury is critical
- Learning and improving is vital
- Demonstrating care is foundational
