Workplace

We are committed to:

• The health, safety and welfare at work of our employees, complying with related health and safety legal requirements, and continually improving our health and safety controls and performance.
• Supplying safe and healthy products.
• Conducting business responsibly with our suppliers, contractors and business customers so that we meet or go beyond legal requirements, respect the human rights of employees, safeguard health and safety at work, protect the environment, and support the contribution of business to achieving sustainable development.

Ethical approach

We care about our colleagues and seek to provide them with fair opportunities in a safe working environment. Recognising that we must constantly evolve to retain a committed and highly skilled workforce, we have recently created a Diversity and Flexibility committee to improve our policy and approach in these areas. In parallel, we are reviewing our current policy on ethics to ensure that the values underpinning this policy are in line with the company’s Vision and values. We will present our new policy on ethics in our next Annual Report, and set out how—in rolling the policy out across the company—we will ensure that it is understood and embraced by all employees.

Safe, healthy working

As part of our constant focus on improving the safety of all our colleagues, we recently revised our health and safety management and technical standards so that we can monitor compliance more closely and drive continual improvement. Providing our people with the right tools and training for health and safety is another cornerstone of our approach.

Our Accident Incident Rate (AIR) in 2008/09 increased over previous years. We are not satisfied with this and are prioritising an improvement. We have launched a ‘Think Safe, Act Safe, Be Safe’ campaign, which encourages people to consider how they act and so help ensure that they and their colleagues stay safe and healthy.

In addition, we support the health and happiness of our employees by creating a workplace that encourages empowerment, flexibility and diversity. Our health and safety committees help to raise awareness of stress and other work-related health issues, which enables us to take appropriate action.

Developing our people

Our aim is to attract, develop and retain a highly motivated and skilled workforce. One of the steps we have taken towards this is our new Leadership Programme, rolled out this year to our top 150 managers.

We believe that to develop and retain our skilled workforce, we need to listen to the needs and opinions of all our employees. So, for the second time in the last two years, we invited our people to take part in an Employee Engagement Survey. After the first of these surveys we put various initiatives in place across Dairy Crest—including Team Talk our monthly team briefing process and our company intranet - the gardens. We also launched a Reward and Recognition scheme that encourages our workforce to acknowledge colleagues who actively live our values and improve business performance.