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Health and Safety at Stora Enso

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Employees’ health and safety is a key priority at Stora Enso. Oyr aim is to get everybody home safe, every day. A company-wide safety culture means that everyone is responsible for making every workday healthy and safe.

Stora Enso’s Health and Safety Policy defines the objectives for the Group’s safety management. It also defines the governance model for managing health and safety topics in practice and for integrating them into annual planning and reporting.

Providing a safe working environment and operational integrity is under constant review and improvement at Stora Enso and is based on international standards, but with an ambition that reaches far beyond mere compliance. Currently 51 out of 53 operational units are externally certified according to the ISO 45001:2018 safety management standard and we encourage supply chain partners to pursue similar certification.

During 2022, Stora Enso restructured its Occupational Health and Safety function to align with the new decentralised operating model and to improve safety performance, and as a result, safety responsibility is now fully within divisions and functions.

We are committed to increasing the sharing of learnings within the company and to prevent recurrence of safety related events.

“Staying safe at work and being able to return safely home is not just a nice credo, it embodies our core values and our commitment to providing a working environment and conditions free from any kind of harm.”
Annica Bresky, CEO

Enhancing safety performance

Stora Enso reports incidents and accidents using the international Occupational Health and Safety (OHSA) definitions when reporting Total Recordable Incident (TRI) and Lost-Time Incident (LTI) rates. We use the Total Recordable Incident (TRI) rate as the main key performance indicator (KPI) as it provides a comprehensive overview of safety performance by including less severe accidents. At the end of 2022, our TRI rate was 5.9 (6.2 in 2021). 

Regarding occupational health, we also measure illness-related absenteeism with a focus on encouraging units to invest in proactive health management.

Stora Enso has a ‘Fair and Just’ approach to all aspects related to safety. The approach provides a transparent way of managing outcomes of safety investigations. It also serves as a tool to facilitate reviews and discussion of safety incidents and other unsafe behaviour.

Since 2019, we have arranged a Group-wide Safety Week with a yearly changing theme that highlights the importance of safety. The aim is to engage management, employees, and contractors to accelerate safety and safety culture. Safety Week results in a range of activities across divisions, functions and, offices, such as safety webinars and training, as well as health and wellbeing activities. 

Health and wellbeing

We believe that the foundation for physical and mental health and wellbeing in the workplace is based on people management, organisation of work, and an inclusive work environment that promotes both physical and mental health. All these factors impact the health and wellbeing, including stress levels of our employees, and need to be addressed to create wellbeing in the organisation. We follow wellbeing in our employee survey that focuses on inclusion and organisational factors impacting health and wellbeing in the workplace. 

Contractor and supplier safety

Stora Enso’s comprehensive approach to safety covers everyone working in and visiting our operations, including our employees, contractors, suppliers, and on-site visitors. Stora Enso also monitors the number of safety incidents among on-site, logistics, and forestry contractors. We have also introduced consistent visitor inductions, that include safety information, for all our units.

We encourage everyone to give feedback and provide ideas on how to further improve safety. Additionally, we promote safety among our contractors and suppliers through a dedicated “Safety Trail” e-learning.

As a part of the aligned group-wide contracting process, Stora Enso asks its suppliers to sign in the Supplier Code of Conduct. It sets suppliers’ requirements on safety management, safety measurement, and performance monitoring. By the end of 2022, Supplier Code of Conduct coverage was 96%. Signing in has been a part of the contract process since 2006.

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