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Our long-term success depends upon how we manage our impacts on society and our relationships with employees, supply chain, business partners and the communities in which we operate.

We view sustainability as a process of continuous improvement and so we will continue to review our measures and modify and add additional measures as we understand more about the areas relevant to Smith & Nephew on which we need to focus to make the most significant impact. In selecting the current measures we investigated a range of indicators commonly used such as the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI).
 
We are currently concentrating on 3 key measures that we believe give a good indication of employee engagement as we consider that employees who are fully engaged with the business at all levels deliver higher and more focused performance and therefore improved results:

• Employee Opinion Survey: an existing activity which we carry out every two years to measure the level of employee engagement with the company and it's vision and values and their view of the effectiveness of the improvement activities actioned in response to scores and comments from the previous surveys
• Employee Development: in which we are measuring the number of internal appointments into vacancies
• Employee Retention: in which we are measuring staff turnover both in general, and employees leaving within 2 years of appointment

The results are shown on the next page.

We continue to investigate other useful measures which once defined and adopted will be introduced.