World leader in smart tubular solutions—this status carries significant social responsibility with it. We must rise to the challenges that we face every day with our stakeholders.
Our duty toward employees, shareholders, customers, and suppliers is to define the highest standards for corporate social responsibility. At Vallourec, this continuous commitment structures our work and serves as a way to make a difference.
Health and safety are core values at Vallourec, as well as our top priorities. Thanks to the constant vigilance and mobilization of our employees and subcontractors, much progress has been made in this area. As a result, 2018 was the fourth year in a row without a fatal accident, also boasting a 28% decrease in accidents requiring a work stoppage and a 15% decrease in total accidents. We owe these highly satisfactory results to the mechanisms in force within the group, including constant reminders of the “12 golden rules,” managers’ safety visits to work stations, and 300 groups around the world dedicated to the continuous improvement of safety. These successes and best practices are shared each year during the Safety Days: at each site, employees come together to participate in safety workshops and recognize our progress. Our sole goal is to strive for zero accidents.
The most important players in our transformation are our employees. They help strengthen our competitive edge. To keep them motivated and engaged in Vallourec’s development, we do everything we can to help them match their individual aspirations with company needs. With an ambitious training program suitable for a world leader in smart tubular solutions, the company encourages employees to make the most of their talents throughout their careers.
Our vision for nurturing talent is based on three goals:
Continuing education—a tool for strategic, managerial, and technical excellence—is primarily provided by Vallourec University (lien) This learning center offers customized training to help employees acquire and reinforce their skills. Almost half of the time spent in training is used to improve career skills, while about a third of the time is spent on safety training.
Vallourec relies on several initiatives to improve employees’ working conditions and efficiency. In France, an agreement involving employee representatives and managers made working from home possible for employees of all work sites. Furthermore, experiments are being conducted to facilitate quality control and maintenance operations using augmented reality. Finally, robots are being tested as an alternative way of performing repetitive administrative tasks.
Vallourec has a motivating, equitable approach to remuneration that includes incentive and profit-sharing schemes, which link employees to overall company performance. In 2018, these schemes totaled 16 million euros. Since 2008, the group has offered annual employee shareholding plans throughout the world. As of 31 December 2018, employees held 3.70% of the group’s capital.
Respecting parity with the gender equality index for professionals
This index is based on 5 indicators:Our gender policy focuses on two goals:
The network [email protected], composed of committed male and female volunteers, is dedicated to discussion and reflection on equality and on women’s place within the group. It proposes different measures to advance and promote gender diversity.
“With [email protected], we are part of a movement for collective progress. Gender diversity is a key element of our diversity policy. It’s a powerful driver for performance, innovation, and shared enrichment. Promoting gender diversity is an act of leadership.”
Sylvie Dubois-Decool Director of Innovation and Sponsor of [email protected]
As a trusted partner, we offer customers solutions with high added value that help them lower their operating costs, wherever they need support, throughout the entire value chain. We know our markets and customers inside out. We welcome our customers’ feedback, since it helps us better understand their needs and anticipate their expectations.
This strength, amplified by our culture of constant innovation and technological leadership, has enabled us to design a new set of services brought together in Vallourec.smart. This bundle of integrated services, which takes our competitiveness to another level, aims to improve the performance of our existing physical services, enrich our deep knowledge of the field, and offer new services that take full advantage of the digital world. We co-develop these high-value-added solutions with our customers to ensure that they fit their needs perfectly. Our approach is innovative, proactive, comprehensive, and agile—all for an unprecedented experience.
Throughout the year, the Investor Relations department organizes meetings among group executives, institutional investors, and financial analysts in France and abroad for the following occasions:
As a “partner for every possibility” for our customers, we seek to build the same kind of contractual, long-term relationship with our suppliers. Our desire to strive for excellence and innovation goes hand-in-hand with a responsible purchasingpolicy. Our Sourcing department follows consistent policies and balances centralized management with local guidance, using tools and processes shared by all group entities. The goal: optimize management of our suppliers, monitor their performance, and facilitate synergies.
We choose suppliers based on corporate social responsibility criteria. We have very high standards with regard to sustainable development, ethics, and safety, since the stakes for the group are equally high. We regularly perform inspections to identify supplier risks in France and elsewhere in the world, and we implement corrective actions to minimize them.