Our Commitment To Social Responsibility
At Renewable Energy Group, we value our team members, our communities, and the people and businesses we work with. We operate globally and aim to maintain consistency across our business. We always prioritize the safety and integrity of our operations, from sourcing to delivery.
Valuing Safety, Integrity and People
We have an established safety culture that expects and empowers our employees to contribute to our goal of zero work injuries or incidents. We also require our employees and business partners to operate ethically in how we do business matters, which is why we have developed several policies to guide our actions. Ultimately, we recognize that all of the places we operate and the people who touch our business are integral to our success.
Fostering a Safety Culture
- Environmental, Health and Safety (EHS) management system — Each facility develops an EHS matrix to track safety and environmental activities, with progress continuously monitored, evaluated and shared. This system is complemented by several support resources, including our corporate policy, standards, procedures, directives and more, to set expectations for employees.
- Training — All REG employees undergo safety training, customized with in-depth training for those whose jobs include more potential hazards.
- SEE Signals — A cognitive process to reduce or eliminate incidents. It requires that someone first stop to identify hazards, next evaluate what could go wrong and last execute the plan and prevent incidents. The company utilizes a visual reminder of a stoplight at each facility to keep this front of mind. It changes the red, yellow and green lights as events occur around the company, keeping all employees attentive and attuned to company safety.
- Safety committees — Composed of employees across the organization, each location has a safety committee to keep safety front of mind, educate and make safety applicable to our daily lives. The committees have also instigated a company-wide practice of beginning all meetings with a safety moment.
- Recognition — Effective safety communication includes celebrating achievements throughout the organization, including incident prevention, corrective action plans and finding ways to reduce risk. Four times a year, we solicit input from across the organization and award employees who have exhibited exemplary safety performance or contributed to a safer workplace for all.
Corporate Compliance That Promotes Integrity
We are a global company operating under numerous laws, standards and norms. As part of our compliance efforts, we have implemented procedures, policies and training to ensure that REG employees and our business partners operate with integrity. These include:
We also maintain an Ethics Helpline to report a possible instance of wrongdoing.
Supporting Our Team Members and Communities
REG wants and encourages our employees to be constructive citizens both at and outside of work. It is important to us that we are good stewards of our communities.
Employees
We seek employee feedback on ways we can improve as an organization through initiatives like an annual survey and an employee-led wellness committee. We listen to our employees and take actions to evolve based on the results. This has led to improvement of our parental leave and support, expansion of our benefit options and development of a flexible work environment. We also maintain an engaged workforce through continuous learning with an internal training department and external training opportunities, designed to link employee career goals and business needs. We promote employee engagement with activities like photo contests to encourage people to get outside, hosting speakers on mental health, holding regular "coffee chats" on Zoom and putting together wellness bingo. We also participated in Iowa's Top Workplace survey, which provided useful insight into employee sentiment and ultimately won us a Top Workplace Award.
Community
We support our communities with an employee-driven philanthropy committee that meets monthly to discuss organizations to support and corporate funds to allocate. Requests can be submitted using this form, and employees are encouraged to share causes of significance. Requests are evaluated for meeting our four philanthropy pillars — Safety/Health, Education, Environment, Underserved Communities — and other criteria such as proximity to our facilities and participant impact.
We also encourage employees to give of their time, with several corporate volunteer events organized throughout the year. Additionally, REG employees receive up to eight hours of paid time off each year to volunteer at a nonprofit organization of their choosing.
We have worked hard to maintain a safe culture and responsibility to the environment and social communities during the COVID-19 pandemic.