Health and well-being
Approach
Elopak has a high attention to well-being in a healthy, decent and engaging working environment.
Ensuring a healthy and decent business environment is the responsibility of corporate and local Human Resources, Health, Safety & Environment (HSE), relevant line managers, and local health service providers. We also provide programs for individual coaching or collective programs for departments.
We believe it is important that employees experience flexibility in their everyday work and in 2022 we updated our Global Flexible Workplace Policy. The policy reflects our guiding principles and is aligned with legal requirements. Coming together and collaborating in the workplace is still the ‘normal’ as we have a strong belief in social interaction being strongly correlated with well-being as well as high employee satisfaction and engagement.
Elopak provides a group-wide travel insurance program (“Duty of Care”), which includes travel assistance service worldwide 24/7. This system provides information to employees on business travels in need of local health assistance.
Performance
Employees on sick-leave are invited to perform alternative tasks or work part-time as part of a program to get employees on long-term sickness back to work earlier. On an annual basis, Elopak facilitate health checks, especially for exposed groups like operators in the plants and Field Service Engineers.
Absence due to sickness has increased from 4.0% in 2021 to 4.3% in 2022. The main reason is absence related to the Covid-19 pandemic, as number of infected people increased when the restrictions were lifted. The number of days staying at home were affected by government regulations, and the virus variants that Europe has been exposed to, especially during the autumn 2022. In addition, people were instructed to stay at home when sick in order not to infect colleagues, which has also impacted the absence numbers. Considering these factors, we do not think the rise is alarming and we are impressed by how the flexibility our employees has helped uphold our business during these challenging times.
Case
Operations in Ukraine during war
It has been challenging to uphold the business and to ensure a safe and healthy working environment for our employees in Ukraine during the war. Experiencing disruptions of air alarms as well as limited availability of electricity, gas and fuel has been hard for our people and our operations.
The way our employees in Ukraine have remained positive and adapted to the situation created by the war is admirable. The Management Teams in Fastiv and Kiev
have continued to develop the company during this challenging period and kept operations running with great performance most of the time. Many office workers have worked remotely from bomb shelters and cafés.
Elopak contributed financially to the Red Cross, as well as financial support to colleagues.
Elopak has had a strong focus on decent working conditions in line with our standards during the integration of our acquisition in Casablanca, Morocco, and Dammam, Saudi-Arabia. A short employee pulse survey for the employees was conducted at the end of the year. The intention was to learn from the integration, to understand the employee experience, getting insights as to how we can improve our approach in any similar processes going forward. The overall result was very positive. Read more about the successful integration here).
Moving forward
All our leaders are responsible for creating and maintaining a healthy working environment. Elopak will continue to follow up on absences in 2023 and continuously evaluate relevant activities for keeping our employees healthy and fit with a focus on positive presence at the workplace. We believe that social interaction in the workplace is strongly correlated with health, workplace engagement, and satisfaction.