Employee health and wellbeing

All of our people are housed in office buildings, which do not present a high-hazard environment. Employee safety is managed by a professional health and safety function in the UK and Europe and by a risk management team in the US. We track incidents by a variety of means: in the US we record indemnity claims against the company’s insurance; in the UK we record lost-time accidents, particularly those giving rise to more than three days off work (which are reportable under the UK RIDDOR legislation and in France the measure is all lost-time accidents.

These differing systems make it difficult to present a global overview of our performance, but we can say that the totals are usually very small. In the UK there were four RIDDOR incidents while in the US there were a total of fourteen indemnity cases, which can include less significant incidents and also cases which are subsequently denied. This figure is lower than that for 2006 (which stood at 36 cases).

Perhaps a greater part of our energy is spent actively promoting the health and wellbeing of our employees. We run a range of employee assistance and health programmes including:

• The HealthMatters program in the US, aims to improve employee health and also to help lower overall health care costs. It incentivises employees with savings on their own monthly medical plan contributions and a reimbursement on fitness costs such as gym membership. Participants get an annual health screen and an initial health assessment. Based on the results, they are then offered a follow-up programme. The health benefits have been significant and are summarised in an annual report.
  
  
• UK employees are supported with an Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) through BUPA to help and guide employees when faced with difficult family or health situations. HR will actively encourage employees to contact the EAP and the company also has an outsourced occupational health service in place.
  
  
• A similar system in the US is NurseLine; a free, confidential, telephone-based advice service available to employees and their families allowing callers to speak with a registered nurse for help with health care decisions 24 hours a day.
  
• US employees can also benefit from LifeEra, which provides free, confidential counselling for employees and their household family members 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
  
  
• All our sites in France are now no-smoking so we took the opportunity of the new law to help Experian people who wanted to stop smoking using The Allen Karr scheme.

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