Health and Safety

Our safety programs emphasize the importance of our vision and values, that people are our most important asset and the safety of our employees and the communities in which we operate is a core part of our ethical business philosophy.

Please refer to the "NSG Group Health and Safety Policy".

Safety organization and strategy

The NSG Group Sustainability Director reports to the President and CEO Munehiro Hosonuma.

Monthly safety updates are provided to the Operational Performance Review meetings while more in-depth management reviews are completed every six months with the senior operations team comprising the heads of the four SBUs and the heads of the Group functions.

All injuries at work are regarded as avoidable. We require full reporting of all incidents, no matter how minor, and appropriate investigation to ensure we learn from all such events. The Group has a focused site approach that provides additional support and more regular reviews for sites that have more than a defined number of significant injuries.

Improving our root cause analysis is a fundamental part of the group’s improvement strategy, it is only by identification of the underlying causes of accidents and incidents that the group operations will improve in the longer term. In order to further develop the ability of the group to enhance the learning opportunities from accident and incident the group has implemented a new reporting and investigation tool from EcoOnline in NSG we call this system AVA. The system has been implemented globally in a phased approach.

The next stage for AVA is to further support the health and safety programs with the introduction of a behavour measure and an auditing system.

Safety performance FY22

The NSG group has had a difficult 12 months, the group sadly had 2 fatal accidents to contractors working with in our operations, one in Europe and one in South America. Both of these events involved site vehicles working in external areas of the plant. The group had already started a significnt program to further identify opportunites to improve vehicle and pedestrian safety across its operations, this programs has been further developed to include all external areas of the sites and further hazard source will be identified and further improvements will be implemented.

The significant injury rate records injuries requiring medical treatment or the reallocation of duties to allow an individual to continue working, expressed as a rate per 200,000 hours worked. The Significant Injury Rate for the year to March 31 2022 remained at 0.31, a 24% increase compared to FY21. We believe that the Corona pandemic has had an impact on the reduction of safety activities. More effective safety activities under corona restrictions are being addressed.

NSG Group’s initiatives for safety

NSG Group is continueing to drive proactive safety through a measure called NABIS (NSG Anzen Bunka Improvement Strategy) this process has three main areas reflecting our focus points. NABIS consists of five components: Leadership, Responsibility and Accountability, Communication, Training, and Involvement.

1. Leadership

   Leaders at all levels of the business are being asked to make their leadership visible and actionable by, for example, using processes such as GEMBA walks to spend more time talking with field leaders and employees about various improvement opportunities.

   To further improve the GEMBA-walk process the group is starting to measure the numbers of GEMBA walks completed and reviewing information derived from the process. This has started in Europe and so far over 900 have been completed.

   We continue to ensure all our leaders assess themselves against our 10 key leadership behaviors, asking them to lead by example and to review their teams against a set of principles, such as never walking past an unsafe act without talking to the individual.

2. Responsibility and accountability

   Leadership teams must ensure that people follow the procedures and safety rules for the tasks we ask them to complete. This area continues to ask leaders to consistently review the ability of their colleagues to competently complete the tasks. This also forms part of the GEMBA process in that leaders observe how individuals are working and identify learning opportunities. We also promote the identification of risks and quatitative assessment of risks in our four lines of business, including new projects.

3. Communication

   Improving the way in which we communicate safety through regular opportunities for two-way briefings and more formal safety meetings with employees and their representatives is an important way of providing clear information on both reactive and proactive safety initiatives. Leadership teams are required to ensure this communication process is effective.

   In FY23 the NSG Group will introduce a safety culture survey to be completed at its larger manufacturing facilities in Architectural, Automotive and Creative Technology. This survey will provide leadership teams with feedback on the current level of safety culture in their plants; in addition, it will also allow employees to provide anonymous comments and suggestions to help plants improve.

   In certain regions and countires the group has formal communication and discussion with employees unions, for example, in Europe the business hold a forum with unions from the Germany, Spain, Italy, Finland the UK etc. this is held on a 6 monthly basis.

4. Training

   Ensuring our employees have the tools and ability to deliver our commitments in a safe and ethical manner requires a continual review and update on training needs and competences. Leaders are required through NABIS to ensure that, from a safety point of view, people have the correct knowledge to complete this task.

5. Involvement

   Asking people to become proactively involved in safety in our plants is part of the leader's responsibility and in NABIS we ask our leadership teams to look for opportunities to involve teams and individuals in safety projects, with the implementation of suggestion schemes and participation in Kaizen processes across many of our larger manufacturing plant being a part of this process.

   In addition, as an opportunity of Involvement for all employees, NSG Group Safety Day is held every October, a day for all Group employees to think about safety. This year, related events were held on October 13 at sites around the world.

   The common theme this year was "mental health. With the effects of the Corona disaster still continuing in some countries, it is important to maintain mental health after a period of great stress.

   In Japan, online seminars were held with outside lecturers to learn about coping with stress and self-care. In addition, safety drills, safety awareness activities, health promotion activities, and community cleanups were conducted in plants around the world.

Moving safety to the next level

The safety strategy within the group remains, it will continue to focus on improving the effectiveness of our safety tools and programs. We believe that our employees and leaders will make the difference in moving safety to the next level through the following initiatives:

• There will be a specific focus on vehicle and pedestrian safety with all larger operations completing a review against a specific set of requirements; the site will then develop action plans for short, medium and long terms plans.
• Where the group has a high number of materials handling equipment, they will look to continue the roll out of pedestrian identification and alert systems.
• Complete the development of the safety culture survey and roll out to all larger operations every year.
• Further develop our first-line supervisors to improve our overall level of safety leadership.

Significant Injury (SI), Lost Time Injury (LTI) and Fatilities

■ Significant Injury Rate (SIR)

■ Percentage Significant Injuries (%)