Note 8: People safety

Our main performance indicators for people safety are the total reportable injury rate (TRR) and the lost time injury rate. We will continue focusing on continuous improvement through our people safety programs in order to achieve the 2020 target of a TRR of less than 1.0 for employees and supervised contractors.

The behavior-based safety program (BBS), which actively engages all manufacturing personnel in identifying and addressing at-risk behavior, has been tailored to the needs of our non-manufacturing personnel and was rolled out in 2014 and 2015 across all locations and groups.

• The overall TRR for employees and supervised contractors decreased to 1.6 (2014: 1.8) which is below the 2015 TRR ambition of 2.0
• The overall downward trend in reportable injuries coincides with both the implementation of our Life-Saving Rules at all our facilities and across all workgroups, and the global roll-out of the people, process and product safety programs that are part of the Safety Common Platform
• Implementation was complemented by a strong focus on compliance and operational discipline, performance monitoring and enforcement of rules when necessary
• There were no employee or contractor fatalities during the year
• The TRR of independent contractors slightly decreased to 2.8 (2014: 2.9)

Behavior-based safety (BBS)

As the reduction in TRR coincided with the implementation of the BBS process across sites, and to ensure that the impact of the process is sustained, the following BBS initiatives were rolled out during 2015:

• Formal review of the BBS process was completed at all manufacturing sites (100 percent reviewed)
• Each BBS review resulted in at least three improvement projects in the site’s safety improvement plan to ensure continuous improvement of the BBS process
• The BBS process was customized for various types of non-manufacturing personnel and rolled out to all of these groups during 2014-2015. In total 96 percent of all personnel have now been included in the process

During 2016, the non-manufacturing locations and groups will be included in the yearly BBS review cycle.

Learning from incidents

Embedding the use of our company-wide Incident Reporting System (IRS) has enabled us to identify and learn from incidents and near-miss trends. The IRS enabled prompt learning from incidents to be shared locally, regionally or company-wide as appropriate. The IRS, an interactive database, enables:

• Anyone in the company to promptly report any incident (including near misses)
• The progress of investigations and resultant actions to be monitored through to completion
• During 2015 >9,500 incidents (including near misses) were reported in the IRS (2014: < 5,000)

Employee health

As well as ensuring a safe working environment, healthy working conditions and managing illness-related absenteeism, we also foster employee health and well-being. This is achieved, for example, through the promotion and use of the Wellness Checkpoint, our health risk appraisal tool.

• The total illness absence rate (TIAR) remained stable at 2.1 percent (2014: 2.1 percent). We continue to monitor this indicator for the whole company, aiming to stay at a level of around 1.9 percent
• The occupational illness frequency rate (OIFR) for employees and supervised contractors has decreased to 0.14 illnesses per million hours worked (2014: 0.24). As the absolute numbers of occupational illnesses are low, small variations in numbers can cause large fluctuations in the OIFR
• Our health risk appraisal tool, the Wellness Checkpoint, is appreciated and used by an increasing number of employees and their families. By the end of 2015, 16,209 people had joined the program since its launch in 2008. During 2015 a further 4 percent of employees joined (2014: 15,555)

Distribution and motor vehicle incidents

Distribution and motor vehicle incidents continue to be a risk to the safety of employees, contractors and the general public. Most incidents occur on the road and in countries where enforcement of traffic regulations is still developing.

• The number of distribution incidents decreased to 49 in 2015 (2014: 52). The majority of the distribution incidents that occurred are on the road, 90 percent of the total (2014: 83 percent)
• There was also a slight increase in distribution incidents involving the transportation of our products by third party contractors. These were mainly in countries where the road infrastructure and traffic enforcement are still developing
• The number of motor vehicle incidents which resulted in injury decreased slightly to 18 (2014: 20)

We raised awareness of safe driving through our risk-based Safe Driving program.

• In 2015, we launched the risk-based Safe Driving e-learning training, which is tailored to individual driver needs and is based on an interactive computer-based assessment. In total, 99 percent of the target group completed this training in 2015 (5,788)
• Practical, on the road defensive driving training started in mid-2015 and was successfully completed by 2,176 company drivers. During 2016, the remaining (1,000) company drivers in this category will be trained