Health and Safety
Healthy and safe work is as integral to our occupational health management as maintaining physical and mental fitness.
For health protection, our integrated protection concept means preventing work-related illnesses; for industrial safety, it means preventing accidents; and for corporate protection, it means ensuring uninterrupted operations.
Through internal and external audits, certification and special programs, the safety standards at our production sites are continually improving. With our health management, we want to use a variety of measures to help our employees have the capacity and individual responsibility to take care of their physical and mental health.
To achieve these goals, we not only regularly and systematically analyze global and internal health and safety risks, but also develop sustainable and attractive programs for industrial safety, industrial medicine, health management, ergonomics and hazardous substances management on the basis of these analyses.
| Accident statistics and absence | Dec. 31, 2020 | Dec. 31, 2019 |
| Sickness rate1 | 3.5 | 3.4 |
| Accident rate2 | ||
| Europe and Middle East | 4.1 | 4.3 |
| North America | 1.9 | 1.7 |
| Latin America | 1.9 | 2.5 |
| Asia/Pacific | 1.4 | 1.1 |
| Worldwide | 2.9 | 3.0 |
| Time lost3 | ||
| Europe and Middle East | 667 | 678 |
| North America | 237 | 355 |
| Latin America | 154 | 444 |
| Asia/Pacific | 272 | 221 |
Worldwide | 464 | 509 |
1 Definition: sickness-related absence relative to contractually agreed working times. Excluding temporary staff (permanent staff only).
2 Accident rate: Number of industrial accidents worldwide resulting in the loss of one or more working-day equivalents per million hours worked.
3 Time lost: Number of hours lost worldwide due to accidents per million hours worked.
