Safety, Security, Health & Environment

Safety, security, health and environmental (SHE) protection are important and enduring issues in a changing world. At Roche, protecting people and the environment isn’t just a legal or social obligation, it’s integral to our operations. For that reason, we approach SHE with the same sense of responsibility – and just as methodically – as we do issues concerning product quality, productivity and cost-efficiency.

In striving for a sustainable development we proactively seek to employ new, more sustainable technologies and processes to minimise our impacts on the environment. We closely follow international developments in the different areas of SHE and take the necessary measures in time to comply with upcoming legislation. We closely cooperate with authorities and governments through our membership in federations or industry working groups.

For the management of SHE issues, we maintain a network of SHE teams in the countries where we operate. SHE leaders and team members act as advisors to Roche business unit managers, ensuring that we meet local regulations and adhere to our corporate standards. Periodic training of our SHE team members assures the application of the same standards in all our operations.

Prevention is the key element in all our activities. Our corporate policies and guidelines outline our commitments for ensuring the safety of people and protecting the environment. We maintain these standards by adhering to laws and regulations, by cooperating with authorities and by communicating openly and frankly about our activities.

Professional risk management is the basic tool to handle all SHE issues and to correctly prioritise our actions.

In terms of SHE management, we want to ensure good corporate citizenship by recognising the concerns of all stakeholders. We communicate openly and frankly about our activities. And we strive for continuous improvement of SHE performance.

Employee health and safety is our first priority. We maintain an integrated programme of employee consultation, workplace inspections and training across all areas of our business.

Our approach is to promote a strong safety culture, one that empowers all of our employees to report and address safety issues. Our activities include maintaining a wiki-style database of SHE good practices to share knowledge and new ideas among our employees. We expect similarly rigorous policies from our contractors.

To monitor SHE performance, we regularly audit all our premises and operations in a risk based frequency. In addition we have established SHE key performance indicators for the Roche Group and for individual operations. We regularly analyse this data and the audit findings to identify areas requiring improvement. Specific findings may also lead to the development of new SHE standards or guidelines.

We communicate our performance to stakeholders in our annual report, through our website and by other channels to help these groups assess our progress toward achieving our SHE objectives.