Case study: How Croda promotes occupational health and safety

What are the material issues the company has identified?

In its 2015 Sustainability Report Croda identified a range of material issues, such as process safety, quality assurance, knowledge management, product stewardship. Among these, promoting occupational health and safety stands out as a key material issue for Croda.

Stakeholder engagement in accordance with the GRI Standards

The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) defines the Principle of Stakeholder Inclusiveness when identifying material issues (or a company’s most important impacts) as follows:

“The organization should identify its stakeholders, and explain how it has responded to their reasonable expectations.”

Stakeholders must be consulted in the process s of identifying a company’s most important impacts and their reasonable expectations and interests must be taken into account. This is an important cornerstone for CSR / sustainability reporting done responsibly.

Key stakeholder groups Croda engages with:   

How stakeholder engagement was made to identify material issues

To identify and prioritize material issues, Croda held a session with guest speakers from key stakeholder groups, including customers, investors and academic institutions. Croda also carried out an internal survey among the company’s middle and senior managers.

What actions were taken by Croda to promote occupational health and safety?

In its 2015 Sustainability Report Croda reports that it took the following actions for promoting occupational health and safety:

• Implementing the principles of organisational mindfulness
• Croda applies the principles of organisational mindfulness across the company’s Behavioural Safety Programmes, with a number of sites integrating elements of this philosophy into local programmes. Moreover, according to a new scheme, committees representing different departments at the company’s sites will identify safe behaviours that need improvement, monitoring behaviours and providing feedback on performance against targets.

• Improving incident investigation
• To facilitate incident investigation, Croda implemented, in 2015, an incident investigation platform developed with the Canadian company Intelex. Moreover, Croda:
  • customized the platform to be also used for change management risk assessment
  • was able, through the web-entry-based platform, to achieve more efficient and quick reporting

• Promoting employee health and wellbeing
• Croda has adopted a decentralized approach to raising awareness and promoting health and wellbeing among employees, to ensure such activities reflect local needs and cultures. Initiatives that the company implements across the globe include:
  • the promotion of exercise
  • access to free health assessments
  • advice on a range of health problems
  • supporting a good work life balance

Which GRI indicators/Standards have been addressed?

The GRI indicator addressed in this case is: G4-LA6: Type of injury and rates of injury, occupational diseases, lost days, and absenteeism, and total number of work-related fatalities, by region and by gender and the updated GRI Standard is: Disclosure 403-2 Types of injury and rates of injury, occupational diseases, lost days, and absenteeism, and number of work-related fatalities

78% of the world’s 250 largest companies report in accordance with the GRI Standards

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References:

1) This case study is based on published information by Croda, located at the link below. For the sake of readability, we did not use brackets or ellipses. However, we made sure that the extra or missing words did not change the report’s meaning. If you would like to quote these written sources from the original, please revert to the original on the Global Reporting Initiative’s Sustainability Disclosure Database at the link:

http://database.globalreporting.org/

2) http://www.fbrh.co.uk/en/global-reporting-initiative-gri-g4-guidelines-download-page

3) https://g4.globalreporting.org/Pages/default.aspx

4) https://www.globalreporting.org/standards/gri-standards-download-center/

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