As part of June's National Safety Month, we’re sharing a series of posts highlighting our regional safety leads and their work promoting and advancing safety across Fluence’s operations.
Leading Safety & Quality in Fluence's APAC Region
Fermida De Leon is Fluence’s safety and quality director for the APAC region. She has overseen safety and quality for megaprojects like SMC’s energy storage portfolio in the Philippines, which totals 470 MW across 13 project sites.
What is your favorite part of your job in safety? What do you particularly like about your work?
In my line of work, I get to engage with people from within and outside the organization, including folks from the communities where we operate. That is what I love the most – positively influencing a broad group of people to be more safety (and quality) minded. I find a great sense of purpose and fulfilment helping colleagues or contractors who had previously undervalued safety become force-multipliers in spreading a mature safety culture throughout Fluence and other organizations.
It is a great feeling to celebrate our team successfully completing a project without any significant injuries, with us all going home to our loved ones, safe and sound.
How is Fluence's approach to safety different from other approaches you may have seen?
How we approach safety is closely linked with our corporate values – Leading, Agile, Responsible and Fun. We make it fun, yet we are responsible and constantly adapting to the changing world and its inherent hazards.
As a rapidly growing company, Fluence is busy welcoming new people from diverse industries and cultures. As with any expanding business in a rapidly growing market, it is normal (and a good thing) for our safety culture and protocols to continuously evolve. What sets Fluence apart is that we’re focused on leveraging our team’s diverse cultural and work backgrounds to continually generate new ideas and best practices about safety for our teams. This makes our approach to safety uniquely “Fluence”.
Why is safety important to you?
In my mind, safety is synonymous with life. My life and my family’s lives are what’s most important to me, so strong safety practices help me and my colleagues safeguard what’s most precious.
I also take a lot of pride in what I do—helping create a more sustainable world. By raising awareness on the importance of health, safety and the environment (HSE) and embedding them into people’s daily lives, HSE principles are effortlessly integrated in our team’s work outputs – products, processes and tasks, making the transition to clean energy seamless, safe and sustainable.
How did you get started in a career in safety?
Safety is a commonly overused and undervalued term, especially by those who don’t work in highly hazardous workspaces. Fifteen years ago, I was one of those people who viewed safety as just another organizational buzzword.
Things changed when I started to be exposed to organizations who valued safety as much as their own lives. Working in the oil and gas industry, where a simple misstep can cause a possible explosion, I saw safety practices as paramount to protecting my life and those of my colleagues. From then on, I was an advocate.
I realized that if safety were critical to ensuring I returned home in one piece, I couldn’t rely on a select group of safety personnel to prioritize it – this was my responsibility. After this realization, I knew that I had to make others "safety believers" as well. And it can be challenging! How can you possibly live your life in a way that mitigates all hazards? Everything around us is inherently risky if not utilized or managed properly. This is where I find purpose – helping people understand the importance of safety to their health and lives and enabling them to identify hazards and how to work around them or control the impact as much as possible.
More Safety Features
- Post 1: Richard Stephen, Americas
- Post 2: Fermida De Leon, APAC
- Post 3: Ekaterina Potemkina, EMEA