Sappi North America's 2016 Sustainability Goals: Our People

At Sappi North America, we are committed to operating our businesses in a sustainable manner. Together with the 2020Vision, Sappi’s global growth strategy, we use our sustainability goals program to set targets, initiate improvement actions and monitor progress.

Achieve Zero Workplace Injuries

Employee safety is a top priority at Sappi North America and is guided by our Project Zero initiative, which sets a goal of zero workplace safety incidents. Lost Time Injury Frequency Rate (LTIFR) is one important measure for tracking work-related incidents resulting in injuries that reduce an employee’s physical capabilities. It measures injuries resulting in lost time per one million work hours. In 2016, our overall performance declined compared to the baseline year, and we’ve redoubled our efforts to ensure that safe work habits are at the forefront of group communication and training. Congratulations to our employees at the Cloquet Mill for achieving the one million safe working hours milestone twice in the 2016 fiscal year, and bringing their site LTIFR to 0.13. Safety systems that include ongoing training and communications are ingrained in our work plans and viewed as integral in our efforts to consistently strive for zero workplace injuries. We focus our efforts on eliminating high hazard exposure, which could harm our employees and contractors. Each year, every employee, in every role, regularly participates in training sessions designed to raise awareness of safety practices that prevent injury. 

Offer 60 Hours of Training and Education per Employee Annually

We believe that maintaining a skilled workforce is critical to achieving high performance in our complex manufacturing operations and business management systems. We continue our commitment to employee training and in 2016 we achieved an average 80 hours per employee, which is consistent with the prior year and ahead of our goal. As we are hiring new employees at high rates due to a large number of pending retirements, delivering ongoing training that effectively grows the skills of our employees is essential. We will continue to apply a high level of attention to ensure employees receive training that increases their skills and proficiency for their current position and for future growth. 

Promote Employee Engagement

Each of the regions has agreed to set targets for two metrics measured in the Towers Watson employee engagement survey, which we undertake every two years. Using 2015 as the baseline year, we will track and work to increase performance of total survey participation and sustainable engagement as tracked in the Towers Watson survey. We measure levels of sustainable engagement by looking at employee rankings for a set of seven questions that cover a range of topics, including company goals, resources provided for employees to achieve high work performance, aspects that contribute to a productive work environment, and accomplishment and recognition. Our baseline and targets for these new goals are introduced in this report, and we aim to increase each metric by two percentage points each survey year. We’ve begun a number of actions to increase engagement across the range of our employee workforce, including supervisor training, an online learning platform, an enhanced onboarding process and broadened employee recognition systems. In addition, we recently rolled out a new corporate social responsibility program entitled Employee Ideas that Matter (EITM). Through this program, employees apply for grants to help benefit non-profit organizations in their local communities. We will begin reporting progress against these goals in the 2017 Sustainability Report. 

Read more from Sappi North America's 2016 Sustainability Report here: http://bit.ly/SNA-2016SR