GN has implemented several policies for managing material impacts related to its own workforce. As a member of the UN Global Compact since 2010, GN is committed to safeguarding human rights and labor rights principles in its own workforce. Accordingly, GN operations and business activities are guided by the UN guiding principles on Business and Human Rights, ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work and the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises. GN upholds human rights principles through the implementation of policies and procedures which prevent discrimination, harassment, advances diversity, and ensure fair and equal treatment of its workforce.

We have identified six negative, potential impacts related to our own workforce, defined as all GN employees. Overall, these impacts reflect our business model, which depends on human input as a vital resource for all our key activities in our own operations: hearing aid component assembly in Denmark, manufacturing of hearing aids in China and Malaysia, final assembly of hearing aids in regional operational centers, R&D and product testing, sales and external collaboration, and white-collar back-office functions. Within this assessment, we established that the most helpful grouping principle for the sake of applying impacts to specific employee categories to be blue-collar employees at major manufacturing sites on the one hand and white-collar and all other blue-collar employees on the other. Given that all white-collar-related potential impacts also apply to blue-collar employees, in this report, we report on the management of impacts either for blue-collar workers at major manufacturing sites or all GN employees.