Health
Our employees are our most important asset. Promoting and enhancing their health and wellbeing is as vital as protecting their safety.
We believe that by supporting healthy lifestyles, health related risks such as fatigue, stress, obesity, and diseases such as HIV/AIDS will be reduced. Investing in the health of our workers, particularly in the context of an ageing workforce and skilled labour shortage, is essential for ongoing business success.
Our goal is no new cases of occupational illness. Our occupational health policy and performance standards, coupled with our health and wellbeing strategy and targets have been put in place to support this goal.
Our health management approach does not just remain in the workplace. At many sites we have recognised the importance of establishing community health programmes (eg HIV/AIDS and malaria) where we operate.
- Occupational health
- Wellbeing
- Community
- Results
We strive to protect the health and wellbeing of our workforce, recognising that a healthy workforce contributes to business success.
A study involving 1,300 employees in Australia identified that issues such as sedentary lifestyles, obesity, psychological health, nutrition, pain management and fatigue were having a significant impact on our employees. We recognise that as our workforce ages, musculo-skeletal conditions and heart disease will become more prevalent in our workplaces. Our health results also show that stress and fatigue are becoming more common.
During 2010 more than 7,000 of our people around the world signed up for our Be Active challenge, which resulted in sustained improvements in levels of activity and perceived wellbeing reported by a large number of participants.
We have benchmarked our health and wellbeing performance against other leading companies, and in 2009 our Executive Committee approved a strategy that will result in an integrated global framework, with strong regional ownership, to support health and wellbeing programmes across the Group.
The strategy is being piloted in selected sites in Australia and US. This involves our employees, human resources departments and medical insurers. In Australia, it has resulted in "Achieve Health", a health and wellbeing programme that offers potential wellbeing, safety and productivity benefits.
And, given the link between fatigue and safety, all of our businesses where people do safety critical jobs are now encouraged to run fatigue management programmes. Tools to facilitate fatigue management programmes are being developed.
