Our People
We value our workforce highly and employ 20,000 people in over 70 countries worldwide.
To deliver our business strategy, both now and in the future, we must be able to attract, retain and motivate employees with the necessary skills and talent across the Group.
To make sure that we have a consistent approach to Human Resources (HR) across the Company, we reviewed our global and local approaches to managing people. This review provided valuable input into establishing a new strategic approach and the necessary support structures to enable best practice people management at all our locations.
We have set high standards across the business through our global HR policies, which as a minimum are compliant with local employment laws and regulations. Specific HR programmes are being developed through three Centres of Excellence for resourcing, talent leadership and learning, and reward.
Our global HR team is supported by a network of local HR professionals, who have an understanding of the local culture and norms in the countries in which we operate, and who are helping to achieve our aims.
Equal Opportunity and Diversity
We believe in equal opportunities and pride ourselves on the diversity of our workforce.
Our status as a truly international company is reflected in the level of national diversity to be found in our senior management group (of 105), which has representatives from 25 different nationalities. Women are also playing an increasing role, with 18 currently in the senior management group (up from twelve in 2011, and nine in 2010), and a 42% presence in our global employee headcount.
Employee Engagement
It is important that our employee behaviours are aligned with the business strategy. We have established a global employee engagement programme through one of our Centres of Excellence. For two years we have been running annual employee engagement surveys (case study – An Engaged Global Workforce) in which over 21,300 people took part last year, representing a 93% participation rate – well above the industry average of 79%. Also, our average engagement score in 2011 was 72%, which is higher than the manufacturing industry norm of 67%.
Health and Safety
As a manufacturing business it is important that we keep our employees safe. Coats uses the USA Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) reporting methodology globally, which produces an index of all reportable health and safety incidents per hundred full time employees (FTEs).
During 2011 we had zero work-related fatalities and no health and safety related prosecutions. Our accident rate for the year was only 0.6 reportable incidents per 100 FTEs globally. This is much lower than the average of 3.5 as reported by OSHA for US textile mills.
Our health, safety and welfare programmes have been successful in keeping our accident statistics low, but we can see the further advantages that a more pro-active Behaviour Based Safety (BBS) programme can bring. We have had success in various countries in implementing a BBS programme and have seen first-hand how that can influence our overall accident rate. The case study – Coats Turkey’s Behaviour Based Safety (BBS) Implementation highlights the success that we have had in Turkey in implementing a BBS programme.
Over the coming year we will be working hard to implement our HR strategy, to further develop our employee engagement programmes and will continue to roll out BBS across the Group.
