
There continues to be a negative trend in the
availability of contractors and cra resources
for construction. That means we must manage
resource availability issues and varied levels of
experience and safety competencies. GES uses
a “hyper-care” program to ensure supervision
and safety oversight of new contractors,
high-risk work scope contractors and less-
experienced contractors.
GES also uses a rigorous, third-party
prequalication program, Highwire, to evaluate
and score contractors and subcontractors.
This tool evaluates contractors’ safety
programs, safety performance, safety incident
rates, experience modier rate and training
verication of cra. GES also reviews any
regulatory citations prior to allowing bids
onprojects.
Safety for non-Company
personnel
We require contractors working at our sites to
follow a prequalication and EHS evaluation
process as specied in our Global Contractor
Management Standard. They are assigned an
internal “contractor liaison” to monitor safety
compliance, perform safety inspections and
evaluations, and ensure they follow their safety
compliance plans. Contractors must report
and investigate all safety incidents and near-
miss events. They also work with site-based
contacts to identify and implement corrective
and preventive actions, which are tracked
tocompletion.
Integrated Facilities Management (IFM)
partners are globally sourced companies
responsible for supporting our facility-
related tasks. We require IFM partners to
follow our safety standards and site-specic
safety procedures in order to monitor
compliance activities associated with their
scope of services, as well as to meet safety-
related performance objectives. A central
governance team manages our IFM partners.
The governance process includes dedicated
resources to measure, monitor and evaluate
partners’ safety performance, as well as
adherence to our requirements. IFM partners
proactively follow a continuous improvement
process that establishes specic targets for
ourgovernance to monitor.
Motor vehicle safety
Our motor vehicle safety program promotes a
strong safety culture for our employees who
operate vehicles to conduct our business.
The program aims to reduce the number and
severity of motor vehicle accidents and injuries,
along with a reduction in driving violations.
Our global motor vehicle safety standards
and programs, including predictive analytics
assessments, help us develop employee-
specic defensive driving action plans. They also
promote safe driving skills and behaviors among
our sales and marketing employees, the primary
operators of our business-use vehicles.
Emergency preparedness
and response
We prioritize incident prevention through
equipment and facility design, operational
and maintenance procedures, and employee
training. We also maintain emergency
preparedness and response capabilities to
eectively respond to unplanned incidents. Our
emergency response programs safeguard our
employees, visitors, the environment, nearby
communities and physical assets. Additionally,
we conduct pre-planning activities for credible
emergencies, including process upsets, res,
spills, releases, severe weather events and
security-related incidents.
Site-specic emergency response procedures
include incident reporting and management,
personnel evacuation, and medical and
incident response and control. We routinely
conduct emergency response drills and train
employees in job- and site-specic emergency
responseduties.
Many of our manufacturing plants have on-
site, trained emergency response teams and
mobile re and rescue apparatus that can
respond to res, medical emergencies, technical
rescues and spills/releases. These teams oen
collaborate with community-based emergency
responders and can provide o-site assistance
when requested.
Loss prevention
We proactively assess and manage the risks
associated with res and natural catastrophes
(e.g., hurricanes, oods, windstorms and
earthquakes) through our Loss Prevention
Program. This program eliminates or reduces
the impact of potential loss events through:
• Facility and process designs
• Inspection, prevention and
maintenanceprocedures
• Fire suppression, detection and specialized
protection systems
• Emergency response and business
continuityprograms
We regularly engage renowned external loss
prevention engineering service providers to
inspect our facility designs and modications.
This process ensures we maintain a high
standard of loss prevention, corresponding to
the level of operational risk, monetary value
andsupply chain importance.
Industrial hygiene
andbiological safety
Our Industrial Hygiene (IH) and Biological
Safety programs prioritize the health and
safety of our employees, customers and
communities by identifying, assessing and
managing various hazards and risks in both
research and manufacturing environments.
In line with industry-leading best practices,
both programs use a hierarchy of controls that
includes prevention, substitution, engineering
controls, administrative controls and personal
protectiveequipment (PPE).
We build safety into our designs for new
processes and facilities by eliminating risks,
substituting less hazardous materials or
processes, and installing eective engineering
and operational controls. Ongoing monitoring
and verication of these controls is essential to
ensure their eectiveness.
In 2024, we supported our dynamic and
rapid business growth by updating the
Corporate Industrial Hygiene standard and the
Corporate Biosafety Manual. These projects
support improved IH and Biological Safety
compliance. In addition, we developed curated
technical content in both IH and Biosafety
capability centers, tailored to specic roles and
responsibilities within our Company. This digital
shi to focused content is intended to facilitate
robust decision-making and sustain work
eciency at our sites.
Access to Health Environmental Sustainability Ethics & Values Reporting indicesOverview 64
MSD Impact Report 2024/2025
Employees
Global talent management | Compensation and benets | Global diversity and inclusion | Health and safety