Investing in safety

We employ more than 200 qualified and experienced safety professionals and during 2020, we conducted more than 400,000 safety compliance inspections across our UK operations. If our safety teams find anything wrong, they recommend actions that are then followed up by senior managers.

We take safety into account in all aspects of our operations, from initial site and process design to training. Safety rules are communicated prominently from the moment anyone—employee or visitor—arrives at one of our fulfilment centres. There are extensive safety signage and hazard warnings throughout every site, including no-step zones beyond safe walkways and flashing hazard lights on all moving equipment. Potentially hazardous machinery incorporates safeguarding measures where required, such as pedestrian proximity radar warnings for moving vehicles and user proximity shutdown and disable mechanisms on automated equipment. We enforce mandatory use of necessary Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) in all working areas across all sites.

Amazon has a strong leadership commitment to safety, which we emphasise in all management communications to reinforce the importance of keeping people safe at work every day. Under our Safety Circles programme, every manager in each fulfilment centre is required to “walk the floor” every week and engage with up to five employees—selected randomly from the employee database—to gather their views on safety.

Each fulfilment centre has a comprehensive management plan reflecting the latest UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE) guidance, International Labour Organization OSH-2001 Guidelines, and other relevant standards and best practices.

Every single person who joins Amazon receives regular dedicated safety training from day one and every internal meeting begins with a safety tip. We also encourage a reporting culture that requires all potential risks and incidents—however minor—to be formally logged for analysis and action.

We monitor safety performance constantly. Detailed safety-related metrics are a key performance indicator in all senior management meetings. They're reviewed weekly at site level and monthly at UK and European leadership level.

Keeping our people safe through the COVID-19 pandemic remains our top priority.

We committed $11.5 billion worldwide in 2020 on COVID-related initiatives to help keep our employees safe and to get items to customs. This included an investment of over $1.2 billion on measures like temperature checks, masks, gloves, enhanced cleaning and sanitation, testing and more. To ensure we were constantly keeping our team safe, we also implemented over 150 significant process changes, including social distancing measures and enhanced cleaning and sanitizing across every site.

Risk and incident reporting are a critical aspect of maintaining effective safety management systems. We encourage employees to report any incident—however seemingly minor or trivial. We also encourage employees to report any situation or event that had the potential to cause harm.

Every report is analysed by members of our safety team, who bring in additional technical expertise if required to address a specific identified risk. We constantly monitor and evaluate incident and HIPO data, and if we spot an emerging pattern of specific incidents or risks, we take prompt action.

We benchmark against UK national data, published by the Health & Safety Executive, which confirms we have over 40% fewer injuries on average than other transportation and warehousing businesses in the UK.

Beyond our fulfilment centres, our delivery network is powered by thousands of small businesses and tens of thousands of drivers who rely on Amazon’s technology and safety initiatives every day.

Our custom electric vehicles are fitted with a range of safety, navigation, and design features. The features include state-of-the-art sensor detection, highway and traffic assist technology, exterior cameras linked to internal digital display for 360-degree visibility, and Alexa-integrated hands-free route and weather information.