Johnson & Johnson looks at the big picture

One of the world’s leading companies which also has one of the most safety conscious fleets is working with the World Health Organisation and the United Nations to promote occupational road risk management globally.

Johnson & Johnson, the United Statesheadquartered multi-national manufacturer of pharmaceutical, medical devices and diagnostics, and consumer products, launched its global fleet safety programme, known as SAFE Fleet, more than a decade ago.

Initially, introduced in North America, SAFE Fleet has subsequently been launched into Johnson & Johnson’s three other operating regions – Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe, Middle East and Africa and Asia Pacific. The organisation has more than 250 operating companies in 57 countries employing 119,200 people worldwide.

Ultimate

The seriousness of the company’s attitude to working towards the ultimate goal of zero road traffic accidents involving staff driving on business is underlined by accident statistics and the interventions resulting from crash analysis being a focal point at board meetings, management meetings and staff appraisals alongside business results.

It is that across the board – top to bottom – focus on road safety that has seen Johnson & Johnson drive its accidents per million miles rate down from 8.76 in 1995 to 5.3 last year. The 39% reduction has been achieved at the same time as the fleet size has increased 157% to more than 35,000 vehicles, almost all cars.

Expressing fleet crashes as accidents per million miles, or APMM, is typically an American corporate mechanism of reporting statistics, but it is becoming more and more accepted in the UK.

Leading risk management company DriveTech, which works with Johnson & Johnson in the UK, suggests that 12 crashes per million miles is an average, although the organisations says it has worked with several organisations that are up around the 24/25 mark.

Benchmarking in 2007 revealed that Johnson & Johnson ranked within the top 25% compared with other multi-national companies and in the top 10% compared with pharmaceutical companies.

It is that record that is seeing Johnson & Johnson playing a pivotal role in moves to improve global road safety with 1.2 million people killed annually and 50 million people injured, according to World Health Organisation (WHO) data.

Russia will host the first global ministerial road safety conference in 2009 and a United Nations resolution passed by the General Assembly earlier this year further encourages “organisations in both the private and the public sector with vehicles fleets to develop and implement policies and practices that will reduce crash risks for vehicle occupants and other road users”.

Gabriel Kardos, the Hungary-based SAFE Fleet manager of Johnson & Johnson Europe, Middle East and Africa, was at the UN General Assembly meeting that adopted the global road safety resolution, and said: “We want to be involved in outreach work to influence more organisations to promote road safety. Road casualties are a global epidemic gaining little attention in the media and if nothing is done the situation will only get worse contributing to more senseless death and injury.

“Reducing global road deaths is a serious issue, but if everyone – the private sector, governments, non-governmental organisations and individuals – get involved and all work together we can prevent a lot of tragedy on our roads worldwide.

“WHO’s statistics show that young people and the family bread winners are the most likely to die on the world’s roads. We therefore have a responsibility to ensure the people that we ask to drive a company car or vehicle on company business arrive home safely everyday to their families.

Business sense

“Driving our sales safely also makes good business sense and substantial cost savings can be realised by corporations when they quantify their accidents in terms of direct and indirect costs and what all of these accidents mean for their business.”

Johnson & Johnson was one of only a handful of private companies to sit on the United Nations Road Safety Collaboration (UNRSC) under the auspices of the WHO, which builds global awareness around the need for better road safety.

In addition, the company spearheaded and continues to be involved in a fleet safety benchmarking global alliance of pharmaceutical, medical, consumer, petrochemical and other companies that share best practice to further promote occupational road risk management.

Opportunity

Mr Kardos, who joined Johnson & Johnson in 1997, said: “It is a good opportunity to share best practices. There is no competition among companies around the promotion of road safety. It is in society’s interest to share policies and best practices around this important issue to keep our drivers and those who use our roads safe and injury free both on and off the job.

“Johnson & Johnson is at the forefront of occupational road risk management. But we must never become complacent. We are continually looking for new initiatives to keep road safety front of mind.”

Johnson & Johnson has been a safety-focused company for more than 100 years. In 1943 Robert Wood Johnson, chairman from 1932- 63 and a member of the company’s founding family, crafted the organisation’s credo - its corporate social responsibility document in modern business parlance - and the foundation for its business success.

Essentially, the credo puts the customer first, employees second, the community third and shareholder fourth. Focussing on promoting road safety, the credo translates as looking after customers, employees and the community with corporate profitability to follow.

Safety-focused

Mr Kardos said: “Fifteen years ago Johnson & Johnson knew it was a safety-focused manufacturer. But staff in our sales forces were being killed and injured on our roads worldwide. We realised then that driving was a high-risk job and we needed to focus on reducing those risks.”

It was then that the company’s SAFE Fleet programme was developed and gradually rolled out worldwide. While the initiative focuses on six key elements and has been adopted throughout more than 250 autonomous operating units, it allows for cultural and legislative differences to be interpreted at a national level so no two countries are likely to follow identical routes.

The safe driving programme involves:

• Active senior management engagement across all organisations within the company and at every opportunity - conferences, company briefings, national and board meetings, regional meetings and sales meetings - promoting the SAFE Fleet message as a ‘way of doing business’ to employees. High-level executives in each region act as champions of the SAFE Fleet program.
• A cultural focus that is fed down the corporate hierarchy to sales managers who must undergo SAFE Fleet training. That involves many responsibilities including conducting yearly commentary drives with each member of staff reporting to them; documenting, reviewing and investigating all accidents after they occur to establish accountability, ensuring fleet safety topics are included in the agendas of all sales and other meetings and ensuring fleet safety is included into the performance reviews of their drivers alongside other sales goals and objectives.
• SAFE Fleet teams exist with individuals drawn from different departments - sales, health and safety, HR etc. - in each country or operating company to support all aspects of policy implementation and provide a platform to review performance and best practice on at least a quarterly basis. It is also each team’s responsibility to provide the information for the Johnson & Johnson team assessments, which are held every three years.
• Driver training which covers four groups – new starters, experienced drivers, high-risk drivers and spouses/partners. Embracing home study training, on-the-road training and meeting-based training, all new recruits complete an on-the-road driver training course within 90 days of employment (in many cases before receiving the keys to the company car) as part of their induction.

Avoid

Ultimately Johnson & Johnson wants to educate its drivers to avoid getting into an accident situation in the first place by driving defensively. In addition, all employees complete on-the-road training at least once every three years. Frequent management communications provide reminders to drivers on key safety rules such as, keeping their distance between the vehicle ahead, vehicle condition and low speed manoeuvres. Additionally, drivers identified as ‘high-risk’ complete a course of targeted training.

However, said Mr Kardos: “While we help drivers to improve their road safety, if there is no improvement in driving performance a person can be dismissed and that has happened in the past. We need to ensure that our people driving on company business are a low risk not only to themselves but to the passengers that may be travelling with them and the drivers and pedestrians in our communities.”

Good staff driving records are recognised and rewarded to motivate safe driving. An employee’s driving record is a key part of individual performance reviews. Cash bonuses and car upgrades, for example, could be given to drivers with a crash-free record, while there are also disincentives as the company aims to ‘drive sales safely’.

Finally, educating staff about non-driving safety topics to further reinforce a health and safety mindset. Some of these include bloodborne pathogen training, the safe lifting and loading and unloading of samples from their cars; wearing the correct footwear to avoid falling and injury; and ergonomics in the car and in their job roles.

Each country’s success in implementing the SAFE Fleet programme is recognised with awards – commitment, merit, achievement and excellence – based on fulfilment of the aforementioned criteria and other markers including accident levels per one million miles. The UK was one of the many teams that achieved the highest excellence award last year.

Sustainability

While Johnson & Johnson says in its latest sustainability report that its at-work driving safety record is ‘very good’, staff were, nevertheless, involved in 4,111 accidents across the company last year, each with the potential to cause serious injury.

However, the majority of those accidents are damage only with no work-related vehicle fatality across the company since 2006 and none in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region since 1998.

Measured as ‘lost work day cases (LWDC)’ Johnson & Johnson’s focus on at-work driving safety is even more impressive. In Europe, Middle East and Africa the company recorded a total of 62 LWDC cases in 1997 of which 19 were fleet-related. Last year those figures had dropped to 25 and three respectively despite a 270% rise in the size of the fleet to around 14,600 vehicles.

Investment

“For this reason, we continue a strong investment in our fleet safety programme,” said Mr Kardos. “Promoting Johnson & Johnson as a health and safety conscious company helps with our employee recruitment and retention and enhances our reputation as a professional and safe company to work for.”

However, while the company’s approach to reducing road crashes has secured a platform on the UNRSC, it is always looking into new and innovative ways to reduce their risk.

Addressing issues around driver distraction is one of the goals this year.

Pilot programmes are being conducted with cognitive and risk-based tools designed to improve and change behavior behind the wheel as Johnson & Johnson strives to cut its accidents per million miles driven rate to 5.2 this year on its journey to an ultimate target of zero.

UN looks to improve global road safety

Those are the words of one of the resolutions adopted by the United Nations General Assembly at the conclusion of its first ever debate on ‘improving global road safety’.

Adopting a series of resolutions aimed at alleviating the global road safety crisis, the General Assembly approved the first global UN conference on road safety, in an effort to reduce the rapidly growing death toll on the world’s roads.

The UN conference, with participation at least at ministerial level, will be held in Russian in 2009.

The decision by the UN General Assembly marks a major victory for the ‘Make Roads Safe’ campaign, which was established by the independent Commission for Global Road Safety and is backed by RoadSafe (RoadSafe: autumn/winter 2007).

The ministerial meeting was one of the key demands of campaigners – more than one million people signed the online ‘Make Roads Safe’ petition – in a bid to stem the toll of 1.2 million deaths on the roads and 50 million people injured annually worldwide.

Road deaths are now the number one killer of young people aged 10-24 worldwide. The latest forecasts show that unless action is taken, more than 20 million lives could be lost from 2000-2015, with a doubling of the annual death rate by 2030, unless the international community begins to take serious action to tackle the problem.

In addition, petitioners want to see: a minimum10-year $300 million global action plan to improve road safety in middle and low income countries; and the World Bank and other multilateral and bilateral donors to ensure that at least 10% of development budgets for roads is dedicated to road safety measures.

Lord Robertson, chairman of the Commission for Global Road Safety, said: “I am delighted that the UN has recognised the scale of human suffering and economic loss caused by road traffic deaths and injuries. Now we must ensure that the UN conference is not just another talking shop, but secures real commitments and takes real action to reverse the tide of global road deaths.”

Apart from encouraging fleets to develop and implement policies and practices that would reduce road-crash risks, the General Assembly also wants to see countries strengthen their commitments to road safety by observing the annual World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims in November and organise global road safety weeks. Five of the main risk factors identified by the UN as causes of road deaths and injury are:

• The non-use of seat-belts and child restraints
• The non-use of helmets by cyclists and motorcyclists
• Drinking and driving
• Inappropriate and excessive speed
• And the lack of appropriate road infrastructure

In a further bid to encourage a focus on reducing road deaths and injuries, the second European Road Safety Day will be held on October 13, 2008 and the World Health Organisation is compiling a major global road safety status report.

Meanwhile, in the run up to the UN ministerial conference on global road safety, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the World Bank Global Road Safety Facility, the Commission for Global Road Safety and the FIA Foundation recently held the ‘Making Roads Safe’ conference to encourage a consensus around common systems of road infrastructure safety design, rating and assessment.

The International Conference on Road Infrastructure Safety was held in London and Lord Robertson said: “We can save millions of lives in the decades ahead by implementing policies and solutions that are proven to work and make roads safer.”

Organisers believe that a safer road infrastructure is a key element of effective strategies to reduce the rising trend of road fatalities in developing countries.

Identifying road design flaws through systematic assessment and then improving safety features through mass action programmes can be one of the most rapid and cost effective ways to reduce road casualties, they say.

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