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Employee Health, Well-being and Resilience

Improving employee health, well-being and resilience

Our employees worldwide deserve extraordinary experiences as they strive to achieve their professional ambitions and thrive at work and at home. As part of this, we are constantly evaluating and enhancing our health and well-being programs based on the evolving needs of our employees.

When COVID-19 progressed around the world, our values guided us as an organization. We acted quickly and created a Global Crisis Management Committee. This was a cross-functional team of internal subject matter experts, including virologists and epidemiologists, who helped to ensure our decisions and policies were guided by science. The team developed robust risk mitigation plans to protect the health and safety of all our employees from the start, immediately implementing a global remote working policy, travel restrictions and robust, enhanced safety protocols for employees in critical onsite operations.

Aligned to the benefits and policies in each country, we launched a number of efforts to help our people navigate pandemic-related challenges and support their overall well-being. For example, in some countries, we moved quickly to increase paid time off for employees to help support those navigating illness and caregiving for family members. In others, we added additional volunteer days for our employees so they could help on the front lines or in their local communities, and we ramped up support for our working parents and caregivers.

In addition, we recognized the importance of collecting new data and information to better understand and address the evolving needs of our employees, adhering to Takeda’s privacy and security values and applicable regulations. Thus, we pivoted our annual employee experience survey to deploy a global survey focused on health and well-being.

Health, Safety & Well-being

Looking after the health, safety and well-being of our colleagues and the communities where we work, live and serve is important to us. From breast cancer awareness workshops and biometric screenings in Austria and Switzerland to mindfulness education and regular lunch-and-learns on nutrition, exercise, mental health and cancer risks in the U.S., we make sure our people have the resources they need to lead healthy lives. In Asia, we prioritize four key issues with our employees: preventing lifestyle diseases and promoting smoking cessation, supporting early detection and treatment of cancer, responding to health issues specific to women and supporting mental health.

Our health and safety efforts are guided by the following principles:

  • We work to be a global leader in health and safety through innovative management practices, working to prevent incidents, and proactively recognizing potential hazards and related risks while working to eliminate them.
  • We provide the tools, resources and programs to support our employees in making healthy lifestyle choices.
  • We include Environment, Health and Safety (EHS) principles in Takeda’s culture through leadership involvement and accountability, as well as by encouraging our employees to consider EHS in all aspects of their work and reduce those risks wherever they can.
  • We make sure to include the viewpoints of our employee works councils and partners, where appropriate, when developing and improving our processes.

Serious Injury and Fatality program

Looking after our people’s safety begins with prevention. We carefully develop the manufacturing processes and safety assessments for each of our products to try to prevent any adverse events. Many manufacturing sites have also implemented a Serious Injury and Fatality (SIF) program, focusing on high-risk activities that have the greatest potential to cause major environmental impact, serious injury or even death. The goal of our SIF program is to make our people more aware of potential SIF (p-SIF) events, understand why they happen and learn how to prevent them.


Takeda’s People-First culture

Well-being is a cornerstone of Takeda’s People-First culture. As a result, Takeda supports behaviors that enable work-life balance, mental and physical wellness, and resources to deliver on our financial, family and community needs. Takeda’s mission of ‘Better Health for People, Brighter Future for the World,’ is only possible when we take care of our own well-being and support the same for our colleagues. Takeda is committed to adhering to all local laws on working hours/overtime or maximum working hours by having strong policies, practices and time keeping systems in place. For example, in Japan our allowable working hours are less than what is even permitted by country law. To ensure adherence and our commitment, we notify our Japan managers and employees who are close to the upper limit of overtime.

With people at the center of all that we do, Takeda is committed to putting our people first in times of workforce restructuring. Takeda has local severance policies or social plans that provide level of pay, benefits and outplacement services to employees negatively impacted by workforce restructuring. There is no better talent than internal Takeda talent so before and after notification we are identifying internal opportunities for those that may be impacted. Where national individual and collective consultation requirements apply Takeda commits to meet all applicable obligations, including meeting the spirit and intent of that legislation of any local or regional obligation.


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