Workplace Safety
Making safety second nature
With 21,000 people working in 164 locations worldwide, avoiding accidents and keeping people healthy remains one of our highest priorities. Our guide? Our Injury and Illness Prevention Plan. It provides clear, consistent and regulatory-compliant policies and protocols for managing health and safety. It describes our standards and specifications for training, safety audits, incident investigation and communications and helps us integrate safety practices in every aspect of our business.
Safety by committee
Informing our safety policies and procedures for our San Diego location is a committee made up of representatives from all 36 buildings at our headquarters. These volunteers accompany our Environmental Health and Safety Department during routine safety inspections, help evacuate buildings when necessary and attend monthly meetings on safety.
We want to make safety a global export. We’re working to understand the complex occupational safety regulations of all the countries where we do business and implement a global safety program. As part of our efforts in 2011, Qualcomm Singapore implemented many new safety initiatives to comply with new national regulations.
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work-related fatalities among our employees in 2011.
Fewer injuries, more training
While our illness and injury rate dropped slightly compared to 2010, it is still somewhat above the industry average. That’s due in part to the fact that we have one of the industry’s most comprehensive and robust accident-reporting systems. Qualcomm employees have a variety of channels for reporting accidents without fear of reprisal—an achievement we are proud of. We encourage employees to report even minor injuries so we can help prevent them from becoming more serious. In 2011, two encouraging indicators suggested that our work-related injuries are becoming less serious: Our costs-per injury-claim dropped 39 percent from our 2010 costs, and our rate of lost time due to injury and illness was 25 percent lower than the industry average.
Total Injury and Incident Rate (per 100 full-time U.S. employees)*
(Compared to Telecom Priviate Industry, U.S., with 1,000 or more employees)
*Work-related injury that required treatment beyond first aid or resulting in lost time or restricted job duties for one or more workers as defined by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
Total Lost Time Injury and Illness Rate (days, per 100 full-time U.S. employees)*
*Work-related injury that resulted in days away from work, restricted work activity and/or job transfer.
Increasing our safety trainings
We’re also proud that we increased our environmental health and safety trainings for our U.S. employees by more than 67 percent from our 2010 offerings. We expect to see our accident and injury rates decrease in coming years as a result of our increased training.
228
employees received first aid, CPR and defibrillator training in 2011.
6%
of our San Diego workforce is trained to respond to a medical emergency on our campus.
Our 2011 Environmental Health and Safety Trainings in the United States consisted of 2,128 trainings totaling 4,384 hours delivered to 2,902 employees, an increase of 67 percent over 2010. Trainings topics included hazardous waste operations and emergency response, driver safety, forklift operation, lab safety, ergonomics and more.
Preventing Ergonomic Injuries
Our employees spend many hours daily at their computers, which can lead to back pain, eyestrain and repetitive stress injuries, to name a few. We provide personalized ergonomic training—including a comprehensive online self-assessment—to help ensure our employees’ workstations produce innovations rather than injuries. In 2011, we performed 1,956 one-on-one ergonomic assessments and experienced a 39 percent reduction in work-related ergonomic injuries.