Author: Keshav Neermul, Global Health and Safety Manager at Dott
As micromobility continues to transform cities, city officials across Europe are increasingly asking what operators are doing to ensure the health and safety of local employees and the general public. After 10 years of public sector experience in setting health and safety policy, I have recently joined Dott to lead a global Health & Safety team.
My career has been built on understanding the relationship between a company’s health and safety culture, the performance of an organisation and the safety and well-being of communities. At Dott, we provide a service, not software. We take the safety of our people and our operations seriously, which is why we do not outsource to the gig economy, and in setting a consistent, raised bar for our health and safety standards across Europe, we can recruit and retain highly skilled, highly qualified teams and improve the global performance of our operations.
At Dott, we are setting a new standard which shows how a strong focus on colleague health and safety can create a positive effect on the rest of the community. First, we are creating a consistent and uniform approach across the 10 countries we operate in across Europe. Then, to take it further, we are sharing the learnings from our communities to enhance the safety of the industry.
We’re working on increasing fire safety and mitigating risk. Our industry works with batteries, which can be a source of risk. That doesn’t mean they have to be unsafe. Because of Dott’s employment model, we are uniquely able to enforce meticulous safety standards for how employees handle, swap, charge, and dispose of every battery in our fleet.
We also want our workers to be well. Internal programmes provide professional upskilling for our local teams. Collaborations with local occupational health services help us reduce muscular strains in battery swapping. Better standards means more efficient repairs, which translates into safer fleets for our riders, and longer lasting vehicles that help meet our sustainability goals.
We’ve named local health and safety champions in every city to implement our policy and improve knowledge sharing. We’re also working with a leading health and safety software provider to manage our operations with best in class incident reporting, accident analysis, and ensure we’re making the smartest evidence-based decisions. These initiatives create an environment where people feel empowered and responsible for the health of their colleagues and communities.
