Wellbeing

The investment in the health of our workers, particularly in the context of an ageing workforce and skilled labour shortage, is essential for on going business success, including the continued improvements in both health and safety performance.

How we support our employees' wellbeing

We recognise that, as the proportion of our older workers grows, the diseases related to ageing will become more prevalent in our workplaces. So in response to this challenge, we have developed active programmes to enhance the health of our employees and contractors.

A 2006 study involving 1,300 employees in Australia led to the planned introduction of "wellness" programmes to tackle issues such as sedentary lifestyles, psychological health, nutrition, pain management and fatigue.  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.

We are also benchmarking our performance in this area against other leading companies, and building a business case for active wellness programmes that are core to the prevention of the newer illnesses such as stress and musculo-skeletal conditions.

Our results

Our results show that the most serious causes of lost working days were fatigue and low energy - these ailments also directly affect safety performance. 

In 2007, more than 77 per cent of our employees work in operations where a health and wellness programme has been implemented.  However, we recognised that they were not always effective in targeting those employees most in need of support and often did not include partners.  Therefore in 2008 we will be launching a comprehensive wellness programme to more than 6,000 employees and their families across 21 sites in Australia.  A feature of this programme will be that employees will be actively supported to seek lasting behaviour change to improve health through access to specialist health coaches.  On demonstrating its success, it is anticipated that other sites across the Group would adopt a similar model.