Health, safety & well-being

Enhancing the health & safety of our employees

The health and safety of our workforce remains a priority and we apply the same standards at all our offices and factories across the world. Our goal is the total elimination of all employee and contractor fatalities with continual improvements in our overall health and safety performance. Our internal global health and safety standards are based on the international standard OHSAS 18001.

Our performance in 2008

We aim not only to continue at our current level of performance but also to eliminate all incidences of employer and contractor fatalities. A key measure of our progress is the total recordable frequency rate. In 2008, this rate decreased to 0.21 accidents per 100 000 hours worked, down 19% on 2007.

*Accident Frequency Rate (AFR) – Workplace accidents resulting in time off work or some temporary restriction in the work that the injured person can undertake. Total Recordable Frequency Rate (TRFR) – All workplace accidents, excluding only those that require simple first aid treatment. In line with industry best practice, we include in our definition of an 'employee', temporary staff and contractors who work under our direct supervision.

Regrettably, in 2008, three employees and one contractor lost their lives. The lessons learned from these deaths were communicated across our business.

** In addition to the recordable fatality data in the chart, where such accidents may be deemed associated with our operations, Unilever requires its organisations to report fatal accidents involving members of the public, and those which occur at third-party contract manufacturers where they are producing goods and services for Unilever. In common with the other companies in our industrial sector, these incidents are only reportable internally.

The definitions and basis of reporting of these occupational safety performance indicators are described in our Basis of reporting document.

Behavioural-based safety

In Europe and Asia, we have deployed the DuPont behavioural based approach to health and safety with good results. We have recently signed a contract with DuPont to adopt a similar approach in the Americas.

We continue to focus our support on those sites with the poorest health and safety performance. Over the last three years we have significantly reduced the bandwidth of our health and safety results.

Governance

Good internal governance systems are necessary to check the robustness of our safety processes. In 2009, we will introduce a new common IT system to collate health and safety compliance data from all Unilever sites worldwide.

Process Safety

We are developing new indicators for measuring process safety. A balanced scorecard of indicators has been developed for each of our potentially most hazardous processes. Data collection will start in 2009.

Occupational health

We are developing new indicators for occupational health performance. A global pilot was launched in 2008 on leading and lagging indicators. These include compliance with health and safety audits, as well as the prevalence of occupational illness. We plan to undertake our first full global data collection exercise in 2009.

Safe travel & transport

Safe travel and transport continue to be a priority for us. The greatest challenge we face is in countries that lack basic road safety infrastructure and enforcement. The risk to our employees from personal street attacks is also rising. We are currently reviewing our security arrangements in those countries where this risk is significant.

For two years now we have been collecting global data on driving injury and non-injury incidents and hope to start publishing this data externally from 2010 once we are satisfied that the information from all regions is aligned.

In 2006 we established our Safe Driving Teams initiative. Led by a senior manager in each country, these teams identified local risk, then developed and implemented tough safe driving standards. These were published in local languages so they could be communicated to all our drivers. We have also banned the general use of mobile phones while driving.

We also require all our professional drivers worldwide to have regular medical check-ups to ensure their fitness to drive.

Where accidents do occur we are keen that any lessons can be learned swiftly and the findings shared throughout the company.

Looking forward

Our overarching goal for 2009 is to continue improving our health and safety performance across all areas of our business. Because safe travel and transport remains a key area, we will continue to embed our global standard on safe travel in vehicles, and develop our data collection on collisions.

Promoting employee health & well-being

We believe that healthy employees contribute to a healthy company. Personal vitality is integral to our vitality agenda. Our Personal Vitality charter was finalised and rolled out in 2007. This focuses on employee health and well-being and ways of working. We now have a global framework of health and well-being benefits which each Unilever operating company will make available to all its employees by 2010. This framework involves coaching people on their exercise, nutrition and mental resilience, and monitoring their progress through an initial check-up and six-monthly follow-ups.

During 2008 the programme was rolled out to our operations in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Our challenge is to encourage people to change their behaviour and sustain new habits, whether it be how often they exercise or their eating habits. We have found that if we can keep people motivated on a programme of change for six months, then the habits are likely to stay. Another important factor is leadership behaviours. People at work tend to mirror patterns of behaviour set by their managers, which is why all our programmes start with senior managers.

Positive results

The programme is beginning to show positive results. Participants have reported improvements in their sleep, energy levels, motivation and work performance.

For example, in Pakistan, for participants who took no exercise at the start of the programme almost a quarter had changed their habits within six months. In Tanzania, of those employees who smoked, almost half had either cut down or stopped altogether. In Mexico, where it is usual to take an early breakfast and a late lunch, the company Board at the Boscas office observed that people often resort to unhealthy mid-morning snacks. As an alternative, they introduced healthy snacks stations, offering fresh water, soya drinks, fruit and nuts.

In another initiative, two of Unilever's UK sites are using the company's nutritional expertise to bring guideline daily amount (GDA) labelling into workplace catering as part of a year-long pilot programme called 'Fit Business'. Highlighting the importance of the workplace in improving people's health, the plan is to align Unilever's nutritional expertise with the government's public health agenda, our brand activities and our strong occupational health agenda. The Institute of Public Policy Research will measure the effectiveness of the programme through online surveys and free health checks.

During 2009, we will be strengthening our data collection and begin reporting on some key performance measures including the percentage of employees attending their annual health check-up, number of cases of work-related illness and absenteeism as a result of work-related illness.

All these programmes have important short- and long-term business as well as health benefits. In the short term we expect to see healthier, more motivated and productive employees, with lower levels of absence due to ill health. The long-term benefits are in lower healthcare costs for companies and society. A study we conducted in the UK, which was published in the American Journal of Health Promotion, estimated that the return on investment for these kinds of employee well-being programmes is in the region of £3.70 for every £1 invested. During 2009 we will carry out further work to evaluate the return on investment of our programme.

New ways of working

For our office locations, we have launched an initiative to enhance people’s well-being through ways of working. We have developed a survey which asks about the quality of people's work environment, including meeting spaces and lighting, furniture and layout, office safety and ability to work flexibly using technology solutions. By the end of 2008, office sites in 12 countries had carried out the survey to set a baseline for their performance. They will undertake specific actions and aim to improve their work environment over the coming year.

We now have state-of-the-art video conferencing technology, called Telepresence, installed at seven locations worldwide. This not only enables people to work with colleagues around the world as if they were in the same room but also aims to minimise work travel and provides staff with a better work–life balance, preventing sickness and burn-out. So far, these facilities have saved €5 million in travel costs, and an estimated 1 700 tonnes of CO₂. We are planning to install similar facilities in more locations.

In 2007 we also made new software available to enable employees to hold virtual meetings through online discussion forums, document-sharing and presentation capability. With 7 000 meetings held each month around the world, this software is already one of the most used forms of technology within Unilever. It enables people to work more flexibly and interact with their colleagues from work, home or while travelling.