Workforce safety and health
What is Workforce safety and health at AstraZeneca?
Company efforts to provide a healthy and safe working environment, based on a culture of learning rather than blame. This includes human and operational performance principles, engineering and preventative maintenance, and supporting employee health through flexible ways of working, access to disease prevention and treatment, and mental health services.
Our approach
We work to promote a safe, healthy and energising work environment for our employees and partners. Our standards apply globally and are stated in our Code of Ethics.
We monitor safety and health targets aimed at supporting our workforce and keeping AstraZeneca among the sector leaders in performance. We are committed to maintaining or exceeding compliance with all legal and regulatory requirements in the locations we operate in. We work in a transparent and ethical manner to develop good relationships with regulators and ensure we contribute to the communities in which we operate
We manage Safety, Health and Environment (SHE) risks, opportunities and performance through the use of effective Management Systems utilising a 'Plan, Do, Check, Act' process to ensure continuous improvement. This requires engagement throughout the organisation, effective leadership, open communication, and a commitment from every employee to themselves, our colleagues, our workplace, our community and our environment.
In September 2021, we reached the final deployment stage of the new reporting AZ SHE System. This will align SHE data management systems and SHE business processes across our company, in order to streamline our collection, storage, and reporting of safety, health and environmental data. This is a significant step in achieving our goal to have a single source of SHE data across our enterprise. The AZ SHE System will help us to drive innovation in the management and reporting of SHE events and sustainability metrics, whilst helping to improve workforce safety and health
In 2021 we implemented a new Global SHE Standard describing our commitment to, management of, and accountability for SHE. This company-wide standard sits directly below our Code of Ethics workplace policies. An accompanying interactive training guide, 'SHE: Everybody’s Business', was developed to ensure every employee understands their role with respect to SHE, how SHE is managed and how to report SHE events. Communications around the guide were led by senior management and more than 12,000 employees viewed the new standard and training guide on our intranet when it launched.
Our key targets and progress
