• Home
• Responsibility
• Our people
• Q&As

Corporate Responsibility Report 2008

Q&As

Here we respond to questions raised by our stakeholders.

As you reduce your workforce, how will you ensure that your remaining employees are not faced with additional stress in their jobs?

We recognise that stress at work is an important issue. We have established programmes to help individuals and teams deal with stress, and offer other support such as on-site health and fitness centres, flexible working arrangements, family support services and health education.

GSK aims to simplify its operating model and create a culture of individual empowerment, where each employee takes responsibility for his or her own work. We are simplifying how we work by removing processes and structures. This reduces the amount of work there is to do in some areas, and as a result fewer people are required. Empowering individuals to make decisions and carry out work without layers of bureaucracy will support this.

How will your Operational Excellence programme affect employees?

Regrettably, our Operational Excellence programme will result in job losses. We will do everything that we can to support affected employees including providing a competitive severance package and providing outplacement support such as assistance in identifying alternative employment, career counselling and retraining.

We will also work hard to ensure the programme does not have a negative impact on the morale of other staff. We have produced a guide for managers with information on how to support employees during the uncertainty, anxiety and stress encountered during major organisational change.

Why are there still relatively few women in senior management at GSK?

We are pleased that the percentage of women in management has increased incrementally over the last four years. However, we recognise that there is still room for improvement, especially in senior management positions and in roles within historically male-dominated disciplines such as science and engineering.

We aim to attract more women to GSK and to support the career development of existing employees through our flexible working programmes. These help employees balance the demands of their personal and professional lives. We also have diversity champions in each business unit as well as employee networks which support career development for women and minority groups at GSK.

Your health and safety performance is below the industry average. What needs to improve?

We know we need to improve our performance in this area. In 2008, an assessment project identified ergonomics and attitudes to health and safety in the workplace as among the main causes of injuries and illnesses. We will target our awareness and training programmes based on these results. During the year, we also launched a toolkit to help sites assess their risks and identify interventions. This has been adopted by our Pharmaceutical manufacturing business and behaviour-based safety programmes are now planned in all sites.

What progress have you made toward your ‘respirator-free’ target?

Results of baseline monitoring of the level of exposure to chemicals in the workplace are being used to define where new and upgraded engineering controls are needed to meet the target for employees in 80% of operations to be able to work without needing to wear respiratory protection. We have reached 42% of operations that have achieved this level of engineering control pending completion of full verification monitoring. We continue to upgrade engineering controls to achieve ‘respirator free’ levels of control but for situations where engineering controls are not possible we will make sure appropriate respiratory protective equipment is used.