Our employees are our most important resource, and we consider their safety and health one of our fundamental responsibilities.

The company continues to improve our safety performance by developing extensive programs to promote a safe and healthy workplace. These efforts are designed to minimize risk to employees and are tailored to our specific work environments, such as manufacturing operations, laboratory environments and office work areas. We continually work to raise awareness about safety with our personnel and adopt enhanced techniques to improve safe work practices.

We take risk management seriously so as to provide employees with as safe a workplace as possible. For example:

• Cumulative trauma disorders, or ergonomics issues as they are commonly known, represent a challenge area for us in office, laboratory and manufacturing environments. View the associated discussion regarding our ergonomics program.
• Some of our manufacturing and laboratory areas require physical activity such as moving and arranging tanks and large equipment. Common incident types include injuries associated with pushing and pulling equipment or slips, trips or falls. We are focused on minimizing these types of incidents and associated injuries.

Jennifer Wright of the Corporate Environment, Health & Safety group demonstrating appropriate pipetting techniques.

Through the years, Genentech continues to introduce new processes and programs that enhance our safety performance, and our improved safety results validate the effectiveness of our efforts. Some of our recent safety focus areas include:

• Fostering and promoting safety leadership within our operations by employee-led Safety Improvement Teams
• Conducting environment, safety and health risk assessments within our operations to identify, characterize and improve the risk profile of hazards associated with different work activities
• Inspecting work areas for potential hazards and improving our ability to safety manage those hazards
• Integrating safety considerations into the design of new facilities and processing operations
• Developing corporate standards on safety and health, and then coaching, monitoring and auditing our operations in relation to these standards

"We are proud of our efforts to integrate all of our business processes, including safety, into a combined management approach for Process Research & Development activities. In fact, we were recently recognized as achieving Class-A status under the stringent Oliver Wight Checklist for Business Excellence. The integration and execution of safe and effective practices is a focus area for our organization. I am pleased to report that the Class-A auditors observed and commented on behaviors among our personnel that are essential to the support and maintenance of a world class safety culture and the pursuit of environmental sustainability objectives."

- Ann Lee,
Vice President of Process Research & Development