By 2022, we aim to have all employees contributing to community activities

Ensuring high ethical standards

We support the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights throughout all our operations. Our global policies uphold the requirements of the UN Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the core ILO Conventions, and the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises. We support freedom of association and 33% of our employees are members of a union and 32% are covered by collective agreements.

Our global Ethics Code, Business Code of Conduct, Supplier Code and our raft of policies covering the full range of ethics and compliance issues set out what we expect from our employees, our suppliers and our partners. We uphold the aims of the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act of 2010 and the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015 and published a statement on our website on what we are doing to prevent modern slavery in our business and supply chains.

All senior employees, those with externally facing roles and other appropriate employees, complete regular mandatory ethics and compliance training. This year, we refreshed our online training and released a specific modern slavery module. This training, rolled out in 11 languages, gives around 4,300 of our employees an understanding of what modern slavery is, how to spot it, what to do if found, and how to prevent it.

Our ‘Doing the right thing’ program, established in 2017, helps to embed our standards even further into our business. With the support of over 40 Ethical Culture Champions acting as points of contact in 32 countries across the world, our Group Legal, Group HR and Group Communications teams raise awareness of ethical issues and dilemmas, highlight instances of exemplary ethical behavior, provide tailored presentations and training materials and support ethics-related discussions and initiatives at a unit level. Our second Global Ethics Day was held in October 2018 with the theme of #Ethics&Me and involved units across the Group organizing events and activities including discussions, video productions, competitions and parliamentary-style debates on topical ethical issues.

Engaging our employees

It is important to us that our employees are fulfilled, are satisfied with their working environment and feel proud to work for Coats. We carry out a global employee engagement survey on an annual basis and in 2018, we were pleased to see that for the fourth year in a row, our engagement score has been maintained at 83%.

Furthermore, 87% said that Coats is a socially and environmentally responsible company when asked.

We were also proud that Coats’ culture and performance are being recognized externally. During 2018 we received several awards for our activities, including being named one of the best companies to work for in Brazil, Indonesia and Vietnam.

Creating a safe, diverse and inclusive workforce

We aim to create an inclusive culture and strive to be an organization in which our employees from diverse backgrounds and different identities can be confident and authentic at work. In 2018, we had 32 nationalities represented in our senior management group and 63 across our business.

Our Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) strategy is centered around four key pillars; providing education and capability building through training in inclusive leadership and unconscious bias; establishing unit-level D&I resource groups to share best practice; regularly measuring our demographics to track progress and establishing talent acceleration programs to develop female, multicultural and millennial leaders of the future. Our D&I strategy is led by the Group Executive Team and through our Steering Group, which conducts regular global D&I Network calls. In 2018, the percentage of females at senior levels increased by 2% to 23.5%. This is a continued area of focus for us in 2019.

In March 2018, we celebrated International Women’s Day under the global theme #PressforProgress. Both teams and individuals across the world identified actions that could be taken locally to support inclusion and increase gender diversity.

Safety is a top priority, but we also understand that the health and well-being of our colleagues inside and outside of work is important too. Over the year, we have placed greater emphasis on this area and have introduced several programs across the business. For example, in Sri Lanka we ran a nine day program of activities that included awareness-raising of non-communicable diseases and a mobile dental clinic; in China, we ran sessions on family relationships, parent and child communication, and anti-smoking; and our program in Mexico, Viva Bem, includes workplace gymnastics classes to promote an active lifestyle, an employee ‘Zen room’ to provide a relaxation area for before and after work, and campaigns to increase employee’s awareness about their health. We aim to continue to build both proactive health monitoring and healthy lifestyle programs across all our sites.

Growing our leadership and delivery capability

Ensuring that we give people the opportunity to develop their career aspirations within our organization while identifying and preparing tomorrow’s leaders is core to our sustainability aspirations.

We are embracing the digital age across our business and are implementing online tools to improve and standardize the way we support and manage our people. Our new online tool ‘SuccessFactors’ gives better visibility of our talent pool globally, and insights on talent utilization, requirements, attraction, development and retention. We have developed a new global banding structure, which gives us greater flexibility and a global consistency in defining job roles and responsibilities.

Our Leadership Capability Framework includes two flagship training programs, Management Capability Development (MCD) and Transcend, and in 2018 we have increased the numbers of females engaged in both. The MCD program builds an individual’s performance over eight management dimensions, including leadership, change management and team building. The Coats Transcend Leaders program is an industry leading, best practice two-year program for our senior leaders covering specific development activities such as coaching, digital learning, case studies and peer learning and also makes innovative use of social networking.

Working alongside our partners

As a supplier of yarns, threads, zippers and related products to a range of manufacturing industries and retailers, we play a key role in the industry supply chain, providing a link between raw material producers and end users. We regularly engage with our customers in managing wider social and environmental issues associated with product manufacture.

It is vital that our relationships with business partners and suppliers are aligned with our own business principles and our approach to sustainability. Our Supplier Code, reviewed again in 2018, sets out of expectations on suppliers and adherence to which is a condition of supply to our business.

Our human rights risk assessment helps us identify the areas of highest risk both in our own business operations and in those of our supply chain. We also assess our supply chains to identify industry/sectoral risks as well as risks from their geographical location. Based on this assessment, we have a program of engagement with suppliers, providing support and guidance on our expectations and compliance with our Supplier Code. This includes face to face workshops and supplier audits for ‘high risk’ suppliers.

Journey to Zero

In 2017, we launched #BeTheOne, a global safety campaign to raise awareness, prevent incidents and encourage colleagues to intervene when they see an at-risk act or unsafe condition. Building on this, we have now launched our Journey to Zero strategy that provides a clear roadmap for the long-term approach to health and safety. It focuses on the identification and management of risk, taking a much more proactive approach to safety management. While we are well on our way with 58% of our locations experiencing zero recordable injuries in 2018, our goal is zero injuries everywhere.

To facilitate this, we have implemented a new online safety management system that gives us greater visibility and increases the speed with which we can respond to activities or behaviors that may be unsafe. A very important aspect of the implementation process has been to encourage colleagues to be proactive

and report hazards before someone gets injured. On this basis, this year alone we have undertaken over 41,000 ‘improvement actions’, largely based on feedback from colleagues, and conducted over 11,300 machinery specific risk assessments. With this kind of focus we have been able to reduce incidents in some areas quite dramatically. For example, incidents relating to the operation of forklift trucks has reduced by 25%.

In 2018, we also installed CCTV cameras in safety-critical manufacturing and distribution areas to gain better understanding of incident details. The use of CCTV has reduced average incident investigation time from 7 days down to 1.5 days. We are also planning to use the CCTV proactively to review and analyze job tasks and identify risks to provide greater safety for all of our shop-floor colleagues.

Last year, we provided over 28 hours of safety training per employee, 13% more than last year, including extensive NEBOSH and IOSH training, and are beginning to roll out ISO 45001, the new international standard for safety, to all our manufacturing sites. And in May 2018, we undertook our second health and safety climate survey and we were pleased to see that 91% of our manufacturing sites scored better than the industry benchmark.

There were no fatalities within our business in 2018. However, we have seen a modest increase in the number of injuries per 100 Full Time Employees (FTE), from 0.56 to 0.58. We believe this increase is because of better reporting of incidents, but we will monitor this closely over the coming months. However, we are encouraged that the number of lost days per incident has decreased dramatically from 14.7 to 10.6, suggesting the severity of incidents has reduced because of our more proactive approach

Read more case studies

For more information on our historical performance download our full data disclosure.