Health, safety and wellbeing

We strive to ensure everyone can go home safe and well every day.

Enabling employees to stay safe and healthy at work is a prerequisite for any responsible company. By empowering our people to adopt safe behaviours at work, we can also have a wider positive impact when they take the same safe behaviours home to their families. Our focus on preventing injuries and promoting health and wellbeing also supports our business by reducing lost time, enhancing productivity and improving employee engagement.

Our commitment

We aim to prevent work-related incidents and illnesses through our Life Saving Rules that target the biggest risks to our people (see box below) and through robust health and safety management systems, certified to ISO 45001 standards at all our aseptic carton production plants, which promote continuous improvement.

We train all employees on health and safety, including how to manage risks specific to their role, be that in our production plants or offices, working from home or providing technical service support at our customers’ sites. We also provide health and safety training for contractors working at our sites.

We go further by empowering our people to provide input and feedback through our behaviour-based safety programme and safety opportunity cards. Each production plant must ensure that at least 15% of employees have completed training on behaviour-based safety – with some sites targeting 100% – and we track progress as part of our monthly health and safety metrics.

Employees also participate in our health and safety steering committees. These include plant management and employee representatives, as well as other participants, such as local environment, health and safety and human resources teams, works council representatives and medical doctors.

We conduct annual risk assessments at each site, and we are committed to monitoring incidents and near misses, systematically analysing their root causes and targeting improvements through local corrective action plans. We also recognise sites that have achieved exceptionally strong safety performance through our Safety Awards scheme.

We are committed to supporting the health and wellbeing of our employees, including helping them through the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. We aim to extend our behaviour-based model to occupational health issues, such as ergonomics. Many of our larger sites offer access to medical professionals, health insurance, health check-ups, fitness programmes and counselling.

Musculoskeletal health issues, such as back problems, can also be an indicator of wider health and wellbeing issues such as workload and stress, and we take a holistic approach to supporting physical health and mental, emotional, financial and social wellbeing to enable our employees to lead fuller, more productive lives both at work and at home.

Our Life Saving Rules

1. Work with a valid work permit when required
2. Check equipment is isolated before work begins
3. Obtain a permit for entry into a confined space
4. Use fall protection when working at height
5. Wear a seatbelt in motor vehicles when provided

The Golden Rule: Intervene to stop work if conditions or behaviour are unsafe.

Our targets

Our progress

In 2022, we achieved global certification to the ISO 45001 standard for health and safety management for our aseptic carton business, and we made safety an immediate priority for our new acquisitions. Several sites reached significant safety milestones and six achieved zero recordable cases – an achievement we aim to extend across our business by 2025. We have continued to roll out our behaviour-based safety programme and took action to address the barriers identified through employee observations. We also refined and began to implement our holistic strategy to support employee health and wellbeing.

Safety first for new acquisitions

Safety comes first in everything we do – including in the integration of new businesses. When new colleagues joined SIG through the acquisition of our bag-in-box and spouted pouch business in 2022, one of the very first things we did was to communicate and train them on our Life Saving Rules, the cornerstone of our health and safety programme.

We are now working to fully integrate newly acquired operations into our established health and safety management systems, and we will begin rolling out our behaviour-based safety programme at new plants in the coming years.

In addition to focusing on the Life Saving Rules to help all employees avoid the biggest safety risks associated with our business, we also designed and ran workshops for plant leadership teams to guide them on how they as leaders can help to strengthen the health and safety culture. The workshops were so successful with leaders at our newly acquired plants that we now plan to roll these out across SIG Group.

Riyadh team win Gold Safety Award

Our Riyadh aseptic carton production plant in Saudi Arabia is the first to win SIG’s new Gold Safety Award for its excellent safety performance.

The Riyadh team earned the award by achieving more than 1,300 safe days and over 4.2 million working hours with zero lost-time cases, as well as demonstrating a strong focus on safe behaviour through its Safety First culture. This milestone could not have been achieved without every employee at the plant making safety a priority each and every day.

“It’s great when successes are recognised and celebrated. Leadership and support from management are extremely important to maintain our safety record, as well as consistent implementation of the Life Saving Rules and behaviour-based safety. Our target now is to remain incident-free for as long as possible.”
Mosharraf Hossain,
Deputy Safety Manager at the Riyadh plant

Performance in 2022

Preventing injuries

• Six of our sites achieved zero recordable cases in 2022, showing that our target of zero recordable cases is possible. Overall, there were 33 recordable cases in 2022 across our aseptic carton business (up from 31 in 2021). This included 18 cases leading to lost working time, six requiring medical treatment and nine resulting in restricted work.
• The lost-time case rate for our aseptic carton business remained low at 0.35 lost-time cases per 200,000 hours worked in 2022, placing us among the top 50% of industry peers.¹ The rate of severity² of lost-time cases was 0.433 in 2022 and we maintained our track record of zero fatalities.
• There were seven recordable cases, all resulting in lost time, among the 867 contractors working at our aseptic carton production sites this year. The lost-time injury frequency rate for contractors was 0.67 per 200,000 hours.
• Several of our sites celebrated safety milestones without a lost-time case this year (so-called safe manhours), including: 4.5 million hours at our plant in Riyadh (Saudi Arabia) and at our original production plant in Suzhou (China), 2 million hours at Wittenberg (Germany), 12 years at the Suzhou assembly plant (China), five years at Neuhausen (Switzerland) and three years for our field service engineers in China.
• Performance against other leading indicators also stayed strong. We recorded 302 near misses in 2022 (compared with 314 in 2021) and a frequency rate of 5.9 near misses per 200,000 working hours (compared with 6.1 in 2021). We conducted an in-depth analysis of near misses at two of our European production sites this year to help us identify ways to prevent these causing incidents in future.
• We achieved global certification to the ISO 45001 standard for health and safety management for our aseptic carton production business for the first time in 2022, building on the existing certification at our plant in Riyadh (Saudi Arabia), which won our Gold Safety Award this year (see case study above). All our aseptic carton production sites completed SEDEX SMETA audits – which include health and safety as one of the four pillars – in 2021. The next scheduled two-yearly audits in 2023 will also include the production plants we acquired this year.
• We rolled out our behaviour-based safety programme – which encourages employees to observe colleagues’ unsafe behaviours and provide feedback to correct them – at our second site in Suzhou (China) and it is now established at all our aseptic carton production plants. In 2022, 16% of employees across these plants made and reported a total of more than 35,000 observations of at-risk behaviours, each of which led to an average of at least one colleague receiving feedback to prevent unsafe behaviour. These observations enabled us to remove over 3,200 barriers to safe behaviour this year – from moving ladders or widening their steps to installing warning alert systems and additional safety guards on machinery. The wider rollout of our new advanced behaviour-based safety process, piloted in Linnich (Germany) last year, has been delayed due to ongoing COVID-19 social distancing as positive feedback based on close observation of colleagues is a key element.
• The new smart factory model being implemented at both SIG production plants in Suzhou (China) will help to reduce safety risks by automatically monitoring behaviours, such as how fast a forklift truck is driven and whether seatbelts are fastened.
• Topics discussed by our employee-management health and safety committees this year included noise measurements, protective equipment (including head protection and helmets), ergonomics, COVID-19 control measures and risk assessment of psychological stress.
• 88% of employees participating in our employee survey³ in 2022 agreed SIG does a good job of ensuring workers’ health and safety wherever we operate, two points above the industry benchmark⁴.

Recordable and lost-time cases across our aseptic carton business

Recordable injuries across our aseptic carton business by type in 2022

(%)

Embedding a safety first culture in our new businesses

• We are working to fully integrate our newly acquired bag-in-box and spouted pouch business and chilled carton business into our established health and safety management systems. We have already begun work to align our incident reporting. Initial indications show that incident rates at the plants we acquired this year are much higher than for our aseptic carton business, where our systems are well established. For our bag-in-box and spouted pouch business in the USA, where the data is most robust, there were 28 recordable cases (including six lost-time cases), the lost-time case rate was 0.56 per 200,000 hours worked and the severity rate of lost-time cases was 0.054 in 2022. We aim to achieve a step change in performance across our new businesses by implementing our tried and tested policies and procedures.
• In 2022, we communicated and trained new colleagues on our Life Saving Rules (see above), and we will begin rolling out our behaviour-based safety programme at newly acquired plants in the coming years. We also designed and ran workshops for plant leadership teams to guide them on how they as leaders can help to strengthen the health and safety culture. Launched initially with leaders at our newly acquired plants, we now plan to roll out these safety leadership workshops across SIG Group.
• The chilled carton production plant in Taiwan that we acquired this year has already achieved ISO 45001 certification and we will work to integrate all our newly acquired plants into SIG’s ISO 45001 global certification in future. Our newly acquired plants will also be included in our next scheduled two-yearly SEDEX SMETA audits in 2023.

Promoting health and wellbeing

• Our health rate⁵ improved slightly to 95.6% in 2022 (from 95.4% in 2021) across our aseptic carton business. Prevention of COVID-19 transmission through the ongoing pandemic remained central to our efforts to promote good health this year, with a strong focus on mask wearing, regular testing and making vaccinations available. Encouraging people to stay at home if they feel unwell is particularly important as we have found that most transmissions happen outside of work. In China, where a new wave of COVID-19 led to an extended lockdown, we created a new chat group to share government and company guidance, provided essential supplies to employees working from home and offered support to help them better manage the emotional challenges of lockdown.
• We refined our holistic wellbeing strategy to include financial wellbeing in addition to physical, emotional and social wellbeing. We included questions in our global employee engagement survey⁶ to help us define a roadmap of activities to foster wellbeing at SIG: 81% of those surveyed feel they have the flexibility they need to balance their work and personal responsibilities (one point above the industry benchmark⁷); 75% said they are able to finish their work within the agreed working hours most of the time (two points above the industry benchmark); and 77% agreed that the physical working conditions (such as facilities, hygiene, ventilation and temperature) at their location are good (on a par with the industry benchmark).
• We launched a working manifesto to help employees cope with new ways of working by, for example, blocking time in their calendars to get things done, not checking emails out of hours, and adding pauses to their working day to think and rest. To reinforce this message, we changed the default meeting length in our calendar system to 25 minutes instead of 30, and 50 minutes instead of an hour to empower people to build in pauses between meetings. We also rolled out a hybrid working model to enhance work–life balance (see Responsible culture: our people).
• We introduced Wellbeing Wednesdays on the last Wednesday of each month to host panel discussions, interviews and other activities designed to raise awareness of mental health, resilience and work–life balance. Topics covered in 2022 include the working manifesto, resilience and mindfulness.
• Teams across our regions continued to implement local health and wellbeing initiatives this year, including: a bike to work campaign and free fitness programmes at a local park in Linnich (Germany); sports, games and a new canteen designed to foster wellbeing at Riyadh (Saudi Arabia); rewards for counting steps to promote physical health and resources to promote emotional wellbeing available to employees and their families through our More Health for You programme in Brazil; and wellbeing apps to promote fitness challenges in North America. Several of our sites also ran teambuilding events and family days to give people a chance to get together informally for fun activities.

1 Based on the latest published lost-time cases for companies listed in our industry in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index.

2 Severity rate based on number of days away from work x 1,000 / 1,000,000.

3 Includes employees joining SIG from Scholle IPN and Evergreen Asia.

4 Industry benchmark defined as norms for manufacturing companies participating in the Willis Towers Watson employee engagement survey.

5 Based on a sickness absence rate of 4.4% (sick days per total days worked). Sickness absence and health rates are based on available data covering more than 90% of employees.

6 Includes employees joining SIG from Scholle IPN and Evergreen Asia.

7 Industry benchmark defined as norms for manufacturing companies participating in the Willis Towers Watson employee engagement survey.