What are the material issues the company has identified?

In its 2015 Corporate Citizenship Report ExxonMobil identified a range of material issues, such as managing climate change risks, corporate governance, local development and supply chain management, environmental performance. Among these, promoting employee health and wellness stands out as a key material issue for ExxonMobil.

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 ExxonMobil engages with:   

Stakeholder Group

Employees

Customers

Suppliers

Communities

Governments

Non-governmental organizations

Shareholders

How stakeholder engagement was made to identify material issues

To identify and prioritize material issues, ExxonMobil engaged external stakeholders and, also, ExxonMobil business line representatives through feedback sessions.

What actions were taken by ExxonMobil to promote employee health and wellness?

In its 2015 Corporate Citizenship Report ExxonMobil reports that it took the following actions for promoting employee health and wellness:

• Identifying and evaluating occupational health risks
• To identify and evaluate occupational health risks ExxonMobil conducts health hazard exposure assessments, relating to field work activities. Industrial hygiene professionals carry out these assessments, using a global, all-inclusive approach.

• Implementing prevention, control and monitoring programs
• To protect ExxonMobil workers and their families, ExxonMobil has developed and implements prevention, control and monitoring programs. These programs deal with the threat of infectious diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, Ebola and other outbreaks. One such program is the company’s Malaria Control Program. The program strives to prevent and swiftly manage malaria cases among employees and contractors working in or traveling to malaria risk areas.

• Supporting employee health through the Culture of Health program
• Culture of Health is a health and wellness program designed to support the health of ExxonMobil employees and reduce health care costs. The company provides collaborative health education and nutrition and fitness programs, also offering employees health coaching and disease management.

• Minimizing worker fatigue
• To minimize and mitigate worker fatigue – which can affect the health and safety of its workforce – ExxonMobil implements relevant programs at various sites, including refineries, chemical plants and pipeline operations in the United States, as well as some of the company’s Upstream facilities in Canada.

Which GRI indicators/Standards have been addressed?

The GRI indicator addressed in this case is: G4-LA7: Workers with high incidence or high risk of diseases related to their occupation and the updated GRI Standard is: Disclosure 403-3 Workers with high incidence or high risk of diseases related to their occupation

 

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 ExxonMobil, 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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