We showed outstanding health and productivity management during the Covid pandemic, external agencies say. Alicia Olo Martinez, our Health and Safety Director, tells how success is due to our core values, which proved our greatest strength during the crisis.
Safety is our absolute priority along with the health of our teams, their families and the communities in which we operate.
In February this year, the leading certification body Bureau Veritas reviewed our overall response to Covid-19. After scrutinizing our governance, standards and procedures, they rated us ‘best in class’.
Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and Nippon Kenko Kaigi also awarded us ‘White 500’ status in 2022 for outstanding progress towards better wellbeing.
This approach of putting people first in everything that we do was stress-tested to extremes over the past two and a half years. Thanks to clear-headed, committed and respected leadership from Alicia, who joined us in November 2018, we stayed true to our goal of striving for zero harm among employees, contractors and suppliers.
At the start of 2020, as it became clear that the new virus was spreading fast around the world, Alicia’s priority was to ensure that we were basing decisions on the best available data and to limit the impact on our people and the business.
Theoretical crisis-management plans had to be turned into practical reality, and Alicia and her team fine-tuned them as they went.
Whether you work in a field, an office or a factory, operations and culture vary. “Different countries had different definitions of vulnerable people,” says Alicia. “But we looked at the science-based facts and considered that protecting not only the mother but also the babies was part of our responsibility, so we took the decision to include expectant mothers in the vulnerable group and protect them accordingly early on in the pandemic.”
Some roles allowed our people to work from home but those on the frontline, from factory staff, sales and security to cleaning, were at a higher risk of exposure, and received bespoke training on minimizing virus transmission.
We used every internal communications channel we had to pass on information, including video calls, presentations, online learning and leaflets. “We were asked: ‘Can I share this information with my family/friend?’ because we were offering such a comprehensive level of detail. And we said yes! We wanted to make information available to as many people as possible.”
“We recognized that we’re not separate from the community in which we operate,” Alicia says. Transmission isn’t just an issue on work premises, the virus can be passed on everywhere. To protect against infection, you can’t just vaccinate employees, everyone needs the jab for herd immunity to be reached. The pandemic showed how interconnected we all are.
One concern was that, because the focus was on Covid, safety standards in other high-risk areas of our business would suffer.
“During the pandemic, we thought that there would be more traffic accidents because perhaps people would be distracted while worrying about themselves and their families, but we found that accidents actually went down and our overall safety performance improved. I think that how we managed the pandemic brought safety to the forefront of everyone’s mind,” she says.
Alicia is proudest of minimizing the number of cases and fatalities, with around 4 percent work-related cases among 60,000 employees and contractors worldwide.
With a gradual return to work, we’ve provided Covid training for everyone and, by the end of 2021, 80 percent of our employees had been vaccinated – well above the local rate in most locations.
It was a big responsibility to identify and implement Covid-19 control measures across the whole JTI family. Did that weigh heavily on Alicia? “No, it’s my job,” she says. “It’s not hard to make decisions when you stick to your values.”
