Creating a unified national approach for safety programs
Why It Matters
Nothing is more important to us than the health and safety of our teammates and the people we serve. We are committed to supporting our teammates so they always feel physically and mentally safe, empowering them to be high performers and to deliver for our customers and communities.
Our Approach
Our health, safety and wellness approach enables our business strategy and People Plan by protecting and empowering our greatest strength—our 128,000 teammates across Canada. We have a rigorous health and safety management system, which aligns with the standard CSA-Z1000.
Enhancing Prevention
As part of our strong commitment to teammate safety and wellbeing, in fiscal 2025 we continued to focus on enhancing our prevention programming, which fosters leader support for safety, by harmonizing the various banner and functional safety programs into one national program. We continued our focus on new teammates, ensuring that safety messages and resources were a key component in their onboarding experience,
and offered a range of training courses for all teammates including Introduction to Health and Safety, Workplace Hazards Awareness, General Safety Rules and Knife Safety.
Advancing our Safety Program
Ongoing work to boost our safety program in fiscal 2025 included:
Enhancing our safety culture through strong relationships with business leaders, creating top-level accountability
Harmonizing policies and procedures, from regional to national programs
Leveraging analytics to drive prevention programming initiatives, leading to year-over-year improvements in our Total Incident Frequency rate and Lost Time Frequency rate
Reducing injury severity and providing more modified work opportunities when a teammate is injured
Staying Focused on Mental Health
We continued the implementation of our business-wide Mental Wellbeing Strategy, focusing on:
- Raising awareness of mental health challenges across all lines of business
- Reducing stigma around mental wellbeing in a measurable way
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Identifying and providing more tools and resources to support teammate mental health, including a new e-learning program for all teammates and facilitator-led training for people leaders and their teams
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Developing key metrics to track the level of mental health issues, the utilization of resources and the impact our program is having with our teammates
Monitoring our Performance
We have a wide range of safety metrics tracked by scope, period and location. These metrics are shared with operations leaders across the business every period. Based on this data, we set annual targets that are specific to regional retail operations and each location. Our experts meet every month with various business leaders to discuss performance, issues and notable items to ensure alignment with business priorities and focus on safety performance.
Working with our Partners
Key partners in delivering our health and safety program include Blue Cross and Sun Life Canada, our main benefits providers. We also work closely with provincial bodies, including workers’ compensation boards,
to shape our approach and preventive programming.
Highlights
Engaging Managers as
Safety Leaders
We believe people leaders have an important role to play in reinforcing safety culture and processes. In fiscal 2025, our team of safety specialists continued to work closely with management teams in higher-risk locations to identify opportunities for enhanced safety leadership and performance. This approach reinforced managing safety performance as an area of accountability for leaders and involved these leaders in the creation and implementation of site-specific plans.
Implementing Corrective Findings and Actions Protocols
Our safety approach empowers our people to prevent incidents and to learn everything we can when something does go wrong to prevent similar events in future. Through regular inspections, audits and investigations, issues are identified that need to be addressed. These items are captured in our safety database, and it is the responsibility of the location management team to action these within a given timeframe. Reports are generated tracking these items, ensuring they are completed on time, which reduces hazards and prevents future injuries.
Champions
Our health and safety program is about building a culture where everyone is committed to looking out for each other, no matter where they are or what they do. After all, safety is strongest when it’s a shared responsibility.”
Cindy Shaw, National Safety Manager, Sobeys Inc.”
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About how we’re improving community health and wellbeing.
As a family nurturing families, we want to ensure Canadians are taken care of today, tomorrow, and in the future. By doing OurPart™ for the environment, we hope to inspire our customers to do theirs. Every step we take together—big or small—can make a difference.
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