Safety at work | Unilever

Contractor safety

In the same way as we are focused on providing safer working conditions for our employees, we are equally committed to providing safer environments for our contracting partners on our sites.

Over the last five years, we have strengthened our Construction Safety Programme with initiatives including Construction Safety Standards improvements, Capability Building Workshops, and the deployment of Global Construction Safety Tools.

How we’re managing process safety

Process safety governance is driven by the Process Safety Steering Committee (PSSC), sponsored by the Chief Supply Chain Officer. The PSSC is represented by senior leaders, Technical Authorities from our Engineering community and Global SHE. Unilever’s key global internal safety standards and third-party Process Safety Management (PSM) audit framework are endorsed by the Committee. These measures support the identification of issues, implementation of action plans and subsequent monitoring of improvements. Issue-specific standards are also in place to support global standards, i.e. hazard-specific standards for individual sites.

As we manufacture a wide variety of products, we have a responsibility to ensure that our operating systems and processes are carefully designed and monitored to protect the people who come into contact with them. Process safety continues to be a key focus area to manage risks in our business and is organised around 12 Process Safety Technical Authorities, with strong governance through the Business Groups.

We have also expanded our Technical Authority governance model to upskill employees across all geographies and drive continuous improvement programmes within our factories. The Technical Authorities at various levels have expanded to over 150 across all Business Groups and geographies.

In the six years since the start of the Committee, process safety has continuously improved, with a 32% yearly reduction in third-party severe audit risk findings. In the last two years, less than 5% high severity audit findings. All high hazard (hazards with impact to community) sites have invested in asset health and design upgrades to achieve satisfactory process safety health scores. With the required commitment of Capex and talent, the risk-based process safety programme has now shifted from reactive to predictive performance.

50%Reduction in contractors’ recordable incidents since 2018

Training for everyone, no matter what their role

In 2021, we launched our new Safety, Health and Environment (SHE) Learning Portal, SHEnet, as the one-stop shop for all online and on-demand SHE training. This offers our employees opportunities to develop their safety knowledge and complete certifications. The portal is also used for recording incidents and observations across all our sites which allows us to track safety performance better. In 2022, we continued to develop our content catalogue, including the addition of digitised audits.

For factory employees, safety training starts before they begin their roles. We have a behaviour-based safety programme which is designed to build knowledge and ensure that all employees are committed to helping achieve Vision Zero. This is our company-wide ambition to have no fatalities in our operations.

Our safety performance in detail

We know that some stakeholders appreciate more in-depth disclosure on our safety performance. Below we provide progress against our preferred accident rate indicator for reporting TRFR for employees since 2010. The TRFR measures the number of occupational accidents per one million hours worked and includes all workplace accidents, excluding only those that require simple first-aid treatment.

The main types of incidents that occur in our manufacturing sites are slips/trips/falls and injuries to hands and arms. In non-manufacturing sites, slips/trips/falls are also the most common type of incident, along with travel-related injuries mainly linked to road accidents.

Accident rates

Notes

In 2013, we adjusted our reporting period from 1 January to 31 December to 1 October to 30 September. PwC has assured our TRFR from 2014 onwards. Since 2019, we have included new acquisitions that operate as decentralised business units in our TRFR; had we included these in 2017 and 2018, our reported TRFR would have been approximately 6% higher in each year.

TRFR is one of two occupational safety performance indicators that has been independently assured by PwC (the other is the number of fatal accidents).

TRFR is calculated as the sum of all lost‐time accidents (LTA) plus restricted work cases (RWC) plus medical treatment cases (MTC), expressed as a rate per million hours worked.

In line with industry best practice, we include in our definition of an ‘employee’, temporary staff and contractors who work under our direct supervision and we capture TRFR for all Unilever manufacturing and non-manufacturing sites (such as offices and research laboratories).

In 2022, the total hours worked equalled 327,116,930.

Fatal accidents

Notes

In 2013, we adjusted our reporting period from 1 January to 31 December to 1 October to 30 September.

Fatalities is one of two occupational safety performance indicators that has been independently assured by PwC. The other indicator is TRFR.

Lost-Time Injury Frequency Rate

Alongside monitoring accidents, it’s vital we analyse their frequency and the nature of any injuries. Our internal reporting system helps us collect more granular data on our Lost-Time Injury Frequency Rate (LTIFR).

LTIFR measures injuries per million hours worked (from 1 October to 30 September). It counts all ‘lost-time’ safety injuries, i.e. injuries that keep people away from work even for one day.

We measure LTIFR for all our direct employees. For the purposes of reporting, we also include contractors under our direct supervision within our direct employee numbers (these are typically the contractors who work on our production lines). We improved LTIFR to 0.24 injuries per million hours worked in 2022.

We also report the contractors who do not work under our direct supervision (who typically provide project or business support). We’ve been using our internal system to help improve safety for these contractors.

Occupational Illness Frequency Rate

Our occupational health programmes cover the prevention of work-related illness and occupational diseases, ergonomics, environmental health and protection from noise and enzymes. See Employee wellbeing for more information.

We track occupational illnesses for our employees under the criteria laid down by the US Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA).

Using the Occupational Illness Frequency Rate (OIFR), we measure the number of work-related ill health cases per million hours worked for all our direct employees (from 1 January to 31 December each year). We do not yet measure this for contractors or the temporary staff we call ‘contingent labour’.

Since 2017, we have seen a steady decline in our OIFR, which now stands at 0.10 per million hours worked, the lowest level since we started reporting.