Safety & security
We are committed to fostering a culture of safety excellence - taking exceptional care of our talents, clients and attendees.
At mci group, the safety of our talents, clients and attendees is the highest priority. Over the years, we have worked towards a rigorous and proactive approach to risk management, building a robust safety culture involving all our stakeholders.
“Security has become an essential and integrated part of our processes, ensuring business as usual, whatever happens.”
Emmanuel André,
Group Health, Safety & Sustainability Director
Our Strategy
Our safety and security strategy covers risk analysis, business continuity and crisis management. This strategy has gradually been embedded in our processes with increasingly efficient tools.
Based in Geneva, our programme is managed by our group health, safety and sustainability director, Emmanuel Andre, a certified safety engineer.
Emmanuel oversees a team of 45 health and safety coordinators who are responsible for ensuring safe and secure operations around the world.
Safe working environments
There were no work-related injuries and/or fatalities and/or notifiable incidents with our employees in 2020.
Client project assessments
We have developed basic and advanced level training for our offices and staff. For more effective training, we have used the concept of “gamification”, creating a health and safety game, educating our teams to evaluate risks and take appropriate measures.
Duty of care
We subscribed to Safeture services, which provide automated security alerts and safety information on users’ smartphones while they are abroad. By hitting the SOS button, our talents can inform our group health, safety and sustainability director of an emergency so that assistance can be provided.
Additional procedures are in place for employees travelling to high-risk destinations, and appropriate measures are taken to protect them from harm.
Data privacy and information security
We have implemented effective policies and technical controls to safeguard all information collected throughout our operations and we are accustomed to complying with strict data protection regulations. Our group data protection officer and chief information officer regularly review our policies and standards in response to changes in our business, technology, infrastructure and regulations.
Our processes and systems are aligned with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and we organise training sessions for our talents and local GDPR referents.
In the last few years, we have moved towards more virtual and hybrid solutions for our clients. Our processes and policies have been adapted accordingly.
Cybersecurity
In our 2021 risk assessment, cyber-attacks were identified as potential threats. We therefore initiated annual penetration testing and regular phishing tests to check for security vulnerabilities.
Since information security and privacy are considered as a priority for mci group, a specific IT risk assessment has been added in 2022 to our annual risk management process (read more under our Risk Assessment section).
As part of our onboarding programme, we provide IT security training for new talents joining the group and we run regular awareness campaigns on fraud and phishing alerts across all our agencies. All policies and best practices are readily available at any time on our intranet.
Business continuity and crisis management
mci group has developed and implemented our own business continuity plans. Our leadership teams are trained and provided with the tools necessary to perform an advanced business continuity and crisis management plan in case of an emergency. We test and train our leadership teams and project managers with crisis management live exercises several times throughout the year.
Covid-19 pandemic
In 2021, we supported our teams and clients in the organisation of hybrid and face-to-face events by integrating the relevant health and safety measures imposed by Covid.
Our teams have become more agile: they have learned to react and adapt to constantly changing government constraints and requirements.
Our performance in 2021
Outlook
- We are developing a new checklist process to make health and safety tracking easier and more effective.
- We are developing a new event audit tool.
- We are preparing for ISO 27001 (information security management system) and ISO 27701 (privacy information management system) certifications to be in place at the of at the end of 2022.