FedEx Hong Kong has more than 200 vehicles hitting the road each day. Packages of different sizes are sorted on conveyor belts and loaded into vans and planes to be shipped around the world.
Thanks to the company's safety policies and a high level of employee awareness, on-the-job incidents are rare at FedEx, despite the level of activity involved in sorting and loading and the time staff spend on the road.
'We take care of our people' said Anthony Leung, managing director of FedEx for Hong Kong and Macau. 'Our corporate philosophy is based on People-Service-Profit. When we talk about people, safety comes first.' He said that since 1996, safety teams had been set up as part of the People-Service-Profit philosophy. The Hong Kong team consists of the manager of each of its eight city locations and a senior manager.
Its first task is to monitor working environments and practices to identify safety concerns. The team does a safety audit of each location every quarter, but Leung said it was important to monitor them more often.
'In addition to the quarterly audit, team representatives from each location are also committed to ensuring a safe working environment by reinforcing safety practices and communicating with employees on a daily basis,' he said.
The team holds monthly meetings to discuss how to resolve issues emerging from the audit and other safety concerns. Their approach is guided by the FedEx global safety manual but when faced with new problems they also look to the best practices of other regional departments.