Social Responsibility

OPERATING SAFELY

Safety is not just a core value — it comes first in everything we do. Our goal is to operate injury-free, and we have made significant improvements to eliminate serious, life-threatening injuries from our workplace. We use a common set of simple and proven tools to manage safety effectively, with a focus on eliminating our highest risks via preventive safety measures, such as hazard identification and correction, and proactively sharing key learnings across our organization. Our efforts over many decades have resulted in a meaningful, sustained reduction in the number and severity of injuries in our workplace. Our Recordable Incident Rate, the number of Occupational Safety and Health Administration-defined recordable injuries and illnesses that occur in 100 workers working in one year, dropped from over 10 in 1990 to 1.76 in 2021. Any injury is one too many for us, but we are pleased with the progress we have made to mitigate our highest-risk areas and reduce the number of injuries our people experience at work.

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Building An Inclusive Culture

Inclusion is a core value at Weyerhaeuser, and we believe that diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) work is critical for our company and our society. We are taking action to increase diversity at all levels of our company, create a truly inclusive environment, and preserve and promote equity for all people — within our operations and in our communities.

We know that increasing diversity requires so much more than recruiting and promoting diverse talent; we must also build a culture that encourages people to stay once they join our team. To help us with this work, we formed an Inclusion Council of 25 diverse employees from all corners of our company who provide perspectives to our senior management team about how we can accelerate our progress. With their input, we set goals to drive improvement in seven key areas each year: leadership and accountability; equitable practices and policies; recruiting and hiring; training and development; communication and culture; affinity and connection; and community outreach.

In 2021, we made significant progress against our targets, which included educating our top leaders about inclusive leadership and fostering a sense of belonging, deploying facilitator-led unconscious bias training to all salaried employees and new hires, expanding our online DE&I training options for all employees, establishing a process for monitoring diversity on hiring teams, launching three refreshed employee resource groups, creating an internal inclusion resources website and donating more than $250,000 to organizations supporting diversity, equity and inclusion. We hired a dedicated DE&I director to help us drive progress on this work, and in response to our 2022 feedback survey of all employees, 82 percent agreed that their work environment is inclusive. Our overall score on all inclusion questions was 81 percent, which is a 2 percent improvement from our previous companywide survey, driven largely by increased scores from women and people of color.

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DEVELOPING OUR PEOPLE

Our employees want to work for a company that cares about their professional growth, and we want people on our team who strive to continually learn and grow throughout their careers.

To facilitate that growth, we offer three leadership development programs, one for each level of leadership: front-line, midlevel and executive. In 2021, we had to delay some of these programs or shift them to a virtual format because of COVID-19 health and safety considerations; after we made those adjustments, more than 200 leaders were able to participate. In addition, our employees collectively logged almost 31,000 hours of training in our online learning management system, which tracks both virtual and classroom courses delivered.

We also place strong emphasis on individual development planning, and in 2021 over 90 percent of our salaried employees updated their career plans despite all the disruptions from the pandemic. In 2021, we also launched a new toolkit for employees and managers to help drive more meaningful and constructive career-coaching conversations. This toolkit includes expanded access to a wide range of online training modules that support individual professional-development needs, as well as a peer-to-peer recommendation list of books, podcasts and videos that support ongoing learning and growth.

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COMPETITIVE PEOPLE PRACTICES

Beyond building a culture of safety, development and inclusion, we also focus on providing competitive pay and benefits that will attract the best talent, and then measuring the success of our culture and programs through regular feedback and pulse surveys.

In 2019, we were one of the first companies in our industry to offer paid parental leave; all U.S. nonunion employees may take up to four weeks of fully paid leave upon the arrival of a new child or children in their family. (Our Canadian employees receive parental leave in accordance with provincial employment standards.) This is in addition to our current six-week disability leave for people who give birth, our adoption assistance program and other family-related benefits.

In 2021, we announced a longer-term remote work policy that provides as much flexibility as possible for workers who are able to work from home, while still working on-site often enough to meet critical business and culture needs.

As part of our ongoing commitment to listen and respond to employee concerns, in 2022 we conducted our annual employee feedback survey to gauge responses to a range of workforce factors that drive engagement and retention. Our overall engagement score was 86 percent, with 87 percent of our employees believing their work has meaning and purpose, 92 percent saying they are proud of the work they do, 85 percent saying they get enough opportunities to do challenging work, 86 percent agreeing they have the training they need to do their jobs well and 92 percent saying they know how their work contributes to the company’s overall performance.

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SUPPORTING OUR COMMUNITIES

We operate in rural communities across Canada and the United States, and we are proud to give our time and money to help ensure they are thriving places to live and work. In 2021, we provided $5.9 million in charitable grants, in-kind donations and sponsorships in our communities, and our employees led 179 community projects and volunteered over 13,200 hours of their time to causes they care about. Through our companywide employee giving platform, we provide an easy way for all employees to donate to their favorite charities using payroll deduction. In 2019, we also added a company matching program of up to $1,000 per employee, and in 2021 we matched about $264,000 in employee donations to double the support for deserving charities in our communities. At the start of 2022, we combined our matching gift programs for donations and volunteerism into one. We now match up to $1,500 per employee per year through our TREE-mendous Matching Gifts program, which creates even more flexible options for employees to support the causes they care about in their communities.

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ENGAGING OUR STAKEHOLDERS  

Our commitment to citizenship goes beyond charitable giving and volunteerism. For us, being a good corporate citizen is also about listening to our neighbors and partners — and working to ensure our company is fully engaged in the communities where we live and work. Our engagement process varies widely based on the project, issue or group, and our stakeholders and partners include everyone from customers and suppliers to investors, employees, communities, policymakers and regulators, Indigenous communities, NGOs and nonprofits, universities and research projects.

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PROMOTING ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION 

Drawing on more than a century of experience in sustainable forestry, we share our story and expertise through tours of our forests and facilities across North America, and we also operate two education centers that are open to the public and provide a range of experiential opportunities to learn about forestry, ecology and environmental issues. In Washington, our Mount St. Helens Forest Learning Center tells the story of the eruption of Mount St. Helens and the forest’s return through interactive, hands-on activities and visual displays. In North Carolina, our Cool Springs Environmental Education Center offers a 1,700-acre working forest and outdoor classroom for visitors — including school groups — to showcase sustainable forestry working in harmony with wildlife habitat, air quality, water quality and recreational activities.

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PROVIDING RECREATIONAL ACCESS

Our millions of acres of U.S. timberlands include spectacular lakes and hardwood forests in the Northeast, expansive Southern pine forests spanning Virginia to Texas, and remote, rugged mountains and scenic rivers in the Pacific Northwest. Whether your passion is bird-watching, hunting, fishing, camping, hiking or cycling, our forests provide exceptional opportunities for outdoor adventure. We are proud to connect people with everything nature has to offer through our lease and permit programs and open access areas.

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