Vodafone Group Plc Annual Report 2025 17
Strategic report
Governance
Financials
Other information
Our people strategy continued
Safety, health and wellbeing Nothing is more important to us than the safety, health, and wellbeing (‘SHW’) of our customers, communities, employees, and partners. We have a simple global commitment: no one gets hurt. If an incident does occur, we take steps aimed to prevent reoccurrence. This has been captured in our Global Commitment Statement which is supported by a video message from our Group Chief Executive. Our SHW framework provides a consistent approach to leadership, planning, performance monitoring, governance, and assurance. Risks We continue to focus on our key risks, which account for the majority of reported incidents and remain amongst our top priorities: occupational road risk, falls from height, working with electricity, and civil works. In recognition of our key risks, we continue to use the ‘Vodafone Absolute Rules’. These rules focus on risks that present the greatest potential for harm for anyone working for or on behalf of Vodafone. The Absolute Rules apply everywhere we work and provide clear expectations for safe behaviour for everyone to follow. The Absolute Rules must be followed by all Vodafone employees and contractors, as well as our suppliers’ employees and contractors. Where this requirement is not met, we take appropriate management action. In the October 2024 Spirit Beat survey 94% of employees agreed that the Absolute Rules are taken seriously at Vodafone. Leadership engagement Our Group Executive Committee (‘ExCo’) and operating company ExCo’s provide visible and clear leadership in SHW. Our senior leaders are actively engaged and carry out regular face-to-face safety engagement throughout the year. Our leaders recognise the importance of connecting with teams and frontline workers as they continue to maintain our networks and work in our retail stores and on customer sites. We encourage our people to raise any concerns or ideas for improvements in SHW and ensure the support of our leaders when they do so.
colleagues participated in the training programme. A total of 925 colleagues identified development opportunities through the skills check tool. Our Go-To-Market learning programme is supporting colleagues in sales to develop across our ‘Beyond Connectivity’ portfolios and have access to learning content at the point of need. This year we trained colleagues on using GenAI tools. In June we launched the ‘GenAI Empowering You’ learning campaign. This comprises a foundational course which 40,000 colleagues completed this year, and a longer advanced module which 1,000 colleagues completed. People experience In November 2024 we started a global market-by- market rollout of Copilot for Microsoft 365. This tool uses GenAI to make daily tasks such as drafting emails, creating presentations and summarising meetings easier, boosting productivity. By January 2025, over 50,000 colleagues had access to Copilot. To support its launch, we delivered 20 skill labs to 13,000 colleagues, focused on prompt engineering and real-life application in the workplace. To further simplify how we work to accelerate performance, we streamlined our HR processes by conducting ongoing pilots to explore the use of GenAI and removing high-touch channels to create a single entry point for HR queries. We transformed our AskHR TOBi chatbot, simplifying how colleagues manage their HR questions and requests. This first launched in October 2024 and is now live in all markets (excluding Germany). The bot handles 65% of all HR questions with an average first-time resolution rate of 74%. We continued to leverage people analytics to ensure effective people decisions and launched our first global HR dashboard, hosted through the Google Cloud Platform, to provide simple access to people insights for our HR community.
We continue to mandate our ‘Leading for Health & Safety at Work’ e-learning module. This module sets out the specific impact we expect our leaders to have. On 31 March 2025, 98% of assigned leaders had completed the module. Supplier engagement Most of our high-risk work and most of the significant incidents we report are as a result of work carried out by suppliers on our behalf. Engagement and collaboration is essential to achieve our common goal of no one gets hurt. We have held quarterly forums with our global suppliers and this year we celebrated a decade of collaboration to develop common ways of working and share best practice to improve workplace safety. This year we held four in-person safety forums in London, Dublin, Düsseldorf and Lisbon together with our larger global suppliers. We also held an awards ceremony in Germany recognising our global suppliers that have supported us on our 10-year safety journey. In Tanzania, our Vodacom operation held an in-person forum bringing together partners from the African continent. Community engagement We strive to play an active role in the communities where we conduct our business and as a result we have various community-focused safety programmes. In Vodafone Intelligent Solutions (‘VOIS’), we introduced the ‘Visit VOIS’ programme, an initiative that reached more than 700 community participants. The programme focused on mental health, particularly its impact on younger generations, and road safety. In Greece, road safety events were held in April in collaboration with the Road Safety Institute and the Road Safety for Motorcycles Institute, with over 100 participants receiving safety training. Throughout the year, employees were trained on Basic Life Support (BLS) and Automated External Defibrillator (AED) usage. Additionally, awareness events on bone marrow transplantation and donor registration were conducted, with over 150 participants and 45 individuals giving samples for
the international donor bank, alongside four blood donation drives supported by over 300 employees. In Albania, the ‘Before I Start Work-Conference’ brought together various industry sectors, contractors, suppliers, and safety experts to enhance safety management practices. The conference focused on sharing experiences with local companies to create safer work places. In South Africa, community safety sessions were conducted at schools, emphasising responsible behaviour to reduce road accidents during the holiday season. In Tanzania, road safety education was provided to thousands of students with the help of the traffic police. In Lesotho, a campaign was organised in collaboration with local authorities on tyre safety and driving under the influence of alcohol and/or drugs. In Mozambique, there was a focus on emergency response and preparedness during natural disasters and civil unrest, collaborating with the police and army. In Egypt, SMS alerts and social media ads were used to promote road safety, along with training for students. In the DRC, road risk campaigns were held in partnership with the local Road Risk Agency, utilising billboards, radio, TV, and digital platforms to reach a national audience. Governance We use a global framework to manage SHW. This includes the monitoring and assessing of risks, setting targets, reviewing progress, and reporting performance. Our framework is based on the international standard ISO 45001 for occupational health and safety and always meets or exceeds local requirements. In addition, five European markets, Egypt, six VOIS locations and Vodafone Business Technology Solutions have independent external certification to ISO 45001. All incidents relating to key risks or breaches of the Vodafone Absolute Rules that are reported are investigated. We ensure that incidents are investigated in accordance with their severity, and appropriate remedial actions and improvements are identified and implemented. We strongly believe in
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