Smiths in the workplace

Career progression

As a global technology company we have a wide range of roles that can provide suitable opportunities to help our people progress their careers within Smiths in line with their capabilities and performance. We seek to identify future leaders and to provide them with the development tools that can support their career ambitions and the needs of the business.

Diversity

Smiths embraces the idea of a diverse workforce, reflecting the diversity of its businesses. Diversity is not just a reflection of relevant legal obligations. It facilitates the contribution of different perspectives and of a wide range of ideas at all levels to support the achievement of full potential goals.

Succession management

Smiths has a systematic succession management process for middle and senior leadership roles. We identify leadership talent and development needs and follow this up with individual development plans that are monitored by senior management to help ensure effective succession as and when this is required.

Developing talent

Smiths has a number of development programmes that are designed to evaluate and enhance core leadership competencies. These development programmes are designed and tailored to address a wide range of learning styles, incorporating workshops, experiential learning, mentoring, team working and project experience.

For employees to reach their full potential, we have to make sure they are properly engaged in the business. Not only do we provide the training and development opportunities that represent an investment in both their and the Group's future, but also a safe and responsible working environment that encourages respect, gives employees the scope to apply their capabilities and to assume responsibilities, and enables both individual and team contributions to be recognised.

Communication

Communication is crucial to helping employees engage with the business. At business unit level, we have a variety of channels including team briefings, presentations, intranets and newsletters. Many businesses have well-established forums for exchanging information and best practice as well as discussing current business issues including efficiency initiatives, training and development, and environment, health and safety issues.

In European Union (EU) countries, we have workplace information and consultation arrangements at all of our sites. These link to the Smiths European Forum through which employee representatives from across the EU meet annually to discuss transnational matters within an EU context. This year's meeting was held in Italy and included a presentation on the Group's financial performance and prospects.

Health and safety

The Chief Executive has overall responsibility for environment, health and safety matters throughout Smiths. The Group Human Resources Director, supported by the Director, Environment, Health and Safety (EHS), is responsible for implementing EHS policies across the Group. The Group EHS Steering Committee monitors performance and sets strategic direction. The Committee includes representatives from all Smiths divisions. It sets policy and targets and meets quarterly to review performance and progress against goals.

The most senior director for each business unit is responsible for EHS matters within their unit. Business unit managers are responsible for making sure that the right resources are in place to manage the level of hazard and risk in their areas. A network of regional co-ordinators helps to ensure that local issues are supported and Group strategy and reporting requirements are met.

A Group EHS Technical Committee, which reports to the Group EHS Steering Committee, was formed in 2007 with technical experts from across the group. This committee assists with the implementation of programmes and development of best practices and training materials to support the Group EHS targets.

Performance against our targets

We monitor our safety performance globally using the United States Occupational Safety and Health Administration standard methodologies (OSHA 29CFR1904), which define rates per 100 employees per year for lost time incidents (where an employee is unable to work after the day of the incident) and recordable incidents (where an employee requires medical attention beyond first aid).

Over the last year we continued to make steady progress towards our target of a lost time incident rate (LTIR) of one or less and have now met this commitment. The LTIR is now better than at any point since it has been measured in Smiths. This success reflects the increased focus on safety throughout Smiths.

We have also seen a reduction in our workers' compensation costs and recordable incident rate (RIR). This was achieved by increased focus by our senior team, improved data and data availability and added attention to those sites performing less well.

Incidents

Regrettably, there were three incidents on Smiths premises during the year that resulted in extended hospital treatment.

• An employee at our Detection facility in Toronto received burns to her leg following the accidental spill and ignition of a flammable liquid.
• A building contractor working on the roof of our Interconnect factory in Costa Rica received an electric shock through touching a live overhead power cable.
• A contractor driving a forklift truck at our Medical warehouse in Otay Mesa, California collided with racking, resulting in injuries to his ribs and spleen.

In each of these cases an extensive review of the circumstances was conducted and a corrective action plan developed and implemented.

We are pleased to report that all three injured parties are recovering well or have already returned to work.

 

Recordable Incident Rate

Lost Time Incident Rate

Looking forward

Looking forward we decided that a three year programme remains sensible to allow time for the development of solutions and allocation of budgets. Thus we have established goals to be achieved by July 2010 which require further improvement to our health and safety performance.

Lost Time Incident Rate

Our improving LTIR performance has led us to switch to the more demanding measure of the RIR. Our goal is an RIR of less than 1.5 and we will be reporting annually on our progress. This challenging target will be supported by our decision to build on the success of our ISO14001 programme by implementing the health and safety management system OHSAS18001 at those sites that are ready.

By fully integrating Health and Safety management with normal operational controls we hope to further improve our overall safety performance. Our target is for more than 66% of eligible sites (those with more than than 50 employees) to be certified.