Our social responsibility

Prevention, Health and Safety is an absolute priority for the cooperative, as is demonstrated in the new Group safety policy, “Safety First”, launched in 2014 as a marker of La Nouvelle Agriculture® strategy. The organisation of this overall policy and the related training should make accidents impossible.

This new Safety First policy has been implemented throughout 2014. It has been led by Terrena’s Safety Network, managed by the Director of Operations, the Group Safety Team and four safety coordinators (for Gastronome, Elivia, the specialist arable division and the front-end division). These coordinators themselves work with designated safety coordinators appointed for each site or each activity. In the long-term, every site will have their own safety officer. The safety officers will oversee the implementation of actions on the ground, in collaboration with the managers. This cascading governance allows the scheme to be deployed at all levels in the Group and ensures that all safety issues are dealt with thoroughly, identifying the 60,000 dangerous situations at the origin of our accidents at work each year.

Safety rituals have been devised: the theme will be discussed first during departmental meetings and seminars; there will be frequent discussions between the members of the Safety Network; definition and scheduling of an internal audit. A reference has been developed by the Group Safety Manager to evaluate the site on 10 different points. In order to lead Safety from the front, a monthly report will be carried out in 2015 for each site, using “Safety First” benchmarks that are regularly revised.

With the implementation of Safety First, we are developing a real “culture of safety”. 6 priorities have been defined for 2015, in order to link progress made in safety with technical improvements on the one hand, and also with management that is people-focused, via awareness and training:

• Improvement of induction procedures for our seasonal workers and temps.
• Deployment of EPI over all sites if necessary.
• Terrena’s Guide to Driving.
• Terrena’s Guide for treating asbestos.
• Deployment of management tool for safety (Evaluation of risks and benchmarks).
• New equipment and safety precautions.

Since 2008, safety has been one of the largest training expenditure items.

The various collective agreements implemented within the Group or UES Terrena are the mark of the good social climate that exists within the company.

Convinced that establishing a positive synergy between the generations is an effective way to collaborate and adapt to changes in professions, we signed, on 11th November 2013, an intergenerational agreement with the aim of:

• facilitating the long-term integration of young people by giving them access to a permanent contract,
• encouraging the hiring and the retention of older workers,
• ensuring the transmission of know-how, knowledge and skills

This agreement comes under our Forward Planning for Employment and Skills scheme. The intergenerational agreement has an objective that 20% of people hired each year are under 30 years old and offered a permanent contract. Actions, such as implementing an induction process, making a mentor available or carrying out monitoring meetings,  facilitate staff integration. In addition, we encourage young people in apprenticeships and / or training schemes via the implementation of partnerships with Higher Education establishments. We can cite examples such as the Groupe ESA, Agro-Campus Ouest, and ONIRIS, with whom we have long-term relationships.

In order to encourage job retention, we encourage internal mobility. We are committed to implementing necessary measures to maintain the rate of employees aged 55 years and above at 12% of our overall workforce. Under certain condition, the intergenerational agreement allows us to give them each year 5% of recruitments in either permanent or fixed term contracts.

Training is a tool for Human Resource Management. It is therefore part of a strategy linked to the activity and must enable staff to be more effective in their roles. This year again, UES Terrena’s expenditure on training is 3 times higher than its obligations.

In 2014, 30,105 hours of training were given in the cooperatives and  1,440 people took at least one training course.