Health and safety

Protecting our employees' health and safety is a natural extension of our commitment to make HP a great place to work. We take seriously our responsibility to provide a safe working environment and recognize that employees are most productive when they are healthy.

Among HP's challenges are meeting the needs of an increasingly mobile workforce—many of our employees telecommute or work from customer locations. We designed several of our 2010 initiatives to address this issue.

We emphasize preventing work-related injuries and illnesses, and we tailor our safety programs to minimize hazards. For example, as slips, trips, and falls are a leading cause of lost workdays at HP (see table below), we publish an online health advisory to raise awareness of the most frequent types of accidents. It includes practical tips for increasing safety in the office and manufacturing areas, and advice on avoiding incidents. We conduct regular inspections to identify potential hazards and use preventative housekeeping measures.

We administer our health and safety programs as part of a comprehensive environmental, health, and safety (EHS) management system that meets or exceeds applicable regulatory requirements globally. This system aligns with the internationally recognized Occupational Health and Safety Assessment Series standard OHSAS 18001 as well as the ANSI Z10 (American National Standard), and ILO-OSH 2001 standards. Three HP sites in Ireland, Scotland, and Singapore are registered to OHSAS 18001.

Health and wellness

We promote health and wellness through online educational materials, travel health advice, and health-awareness activities. In 2010, we launched a new employee wellness program, focusing on physical health, financial well-being, and stress management. For more information, see the Wellness section of this report.

We also provide access to health benefit programs and promote healthy lifestyles. Our global benefits policy applies to all HP employees. Depending on their location and other variables, employees can be eligible for programs including medical, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance.

To increase participation, U.S. employees and covered domestic partners who complete a health-risk questionnaire, participate in self-guided health education, and enroll in a lifestyle improvement program may receive funding from HP to purchase additional health and wellness benefits. In 2010, 63% of HP employees took part in the program.

Health and wellness are also central to our global real-estate initiative, a program designed to ensure that HP workspaces worldwide are fully aligned with the company's business needs. We have historically made a number of ergonomic accessories, such as keyboard trays and monitor arms, available to our employees so that they can improve the ergonomics of their workspaces. In 2010, we included ergonomic accessories in our global workplace standards.

Communications

Our HP Safety and Comfort Guide is available to all employees and customers, in 34 languages. The guide offers assessment strategies and recommendations to reduce ergonomic risks.

Our EHS intranet site includes resources for employees, such as:

• Self-audits that help sites assess how well employees manage health and safety risks.
• Searchable instructions for safe chemical handling.
• Information on emergency and disaster planning, prevention, response, and recovery.

In some countries, infectious diseases present a serious risk to our employees. We provide travel health advice and raise awareness about precautions, such as proper hygiene to prevent illness. We respond to specific infection risks by providing affected employees with information and access to health professionals to address questions confidentially.

Training

We emphasize health and safety (H&S) from the first day of employment. Our H&S training programs include:

• General education, such as employee orientation, to provide an overview of our policies and advice on preventing and responding to workplace injuries. Employees take a required online refresher course annually.
• Job-specific training that covers hazards relating to work environments or responsibilities. For example, HP provides courses for customer engineers and their managers about reducing risks while working at non-HP sites.
• Ergonomics training, to reduce the risk of injuries and illnesses related to materials handling and day-to-day office work. In 2010, we developed an online risk-assessment tool in conjunction with making the HP Safety and Comfort Guide available to employees through Grow@hp, giving us the ability to track participation. Designed for our increasingly mobile workforce, the risk-assessment tool addresses the risks associated with several types of working environments, including home offices, shared work spaces, dedicated offices, and customer locations.

We provide many of our training courses in multiple languages to meet the needs of our global workforce.

Performance

Health and safety metrics

We record and investigate work-related injuries and illnesses to identify and help eliminate their root causes, and to assess the effectiveness of our management systems. Our H&S data collection and tracking system, which tracks injury trends at the site and corporate levels, adheres to the International Labour Organization Code of Practice on Recording and Notification of Occupational Accidents and Diseases.

Our primary metric is the lost workday case rate (i.e., the number of work-related injuries that result in time away from work per 100 employees working a full year). We also measure recordable injuries and illnesses and incidents requiring medical attention beyond first aid. These include incidents both with and without lost time.

Please note that the following metrics do not include the Palm and 3Com employees who joined HP in 2010.

Lost workday case rate, 2006–2010*

• (Hover over segments for detail by region)
• * Lost workday case rate is the number of work-related injuries that result in time away from work per 100 employees working a full year. U.S. industry average in 2009: 0.3 (latest data available). Americas includes data from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the United States. Europe, Middle East, and Africa Includes data from Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Asia Pacific and Japan includes data from India, Japan, and Singapore.

Leading causes of lost workdays, 2010

In 2010, the proportion of lost workdays caused by slips, trips, and falls increased to 40% from 29% in 2009. We have indentified numerous and diverse causes for this increase and will continue to evaluate ways to address these hazards and make educational resources and training available on our EHS intranet.

Recordable incidence rate, 2007–2010*

• (Hover over segments for detail by region)
• * Recordable incidence rate is the number of all work-related lost-time and no-lost-time cases requiring more than first aid per 100 employees working a full year. U.S. industry average in 2009: 0.5 (latest data available). Americas includes data from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the United States. Europe, Middle East, and Africa includes data from Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Poland, Romania, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Asia Pacific and Japan includes data from Australia, India, Japan, and Singapore.

Leading causes of all recordable cases (with and without lost time), 2010