As a responsible company, our most important principle is the health and safety of our employees in the workplace. As such, we work hard to provide a working environment at E.ON that ensures the health and safety of every single person associated with our business.

Wulf Bernotat clearly sums up this priority on behalf of our company's senior management: "As the Board of E.ON, we are fully committed to the principle of 'No Compromise'. Nothing we do is so important or urgent that our people should ever work unsafely."

Work-related illnesses, injuries and accidents are unacceptable to us as a business - and we tolerate no compromises here. Our aim is for E.ON to become the world's largest investor-owned power and gas companies and a key part of this goal is becoming the leader in the energy industry in the area of health and safety.

Establishing industry-leading safety standards is a challenge for any company. As an energy group, our field of business covers the entire value chain of power generation and distribution. This means that we face a particular challenge, as our work - and the work of our employees and partners - is to an extent unavoidably associated with risks and potential dangers. As a company that is expanding across the globe, we face additional challenges at our regional locations. While the ultimate requirements are the same, by which we mean eliminating accidents and ill health, the challenges we face in achieving this differ. Globally diverse cultural, financial and legal conditions are just some of the factors we need to take into account.

At present, the safety standards at the various E.ON Group companies still vary. In some market units, a good health and safety structure and culture has been established over many years, such as at U.S. Midwest, which serves as a groupwide Good Practice model. We are also striving to adapt our new market units to our other Group companies' safety standard as quickly as possible. To achieve this we're investing in education and training programs, drawing upon the advice of external experts, continually improving the conditions at particularly high-risk facilities - and last but not least, also raising the safety awareness of our employees.

With offers to promote the health of our employees we additionally intend to motivate our employees to care for their own personal fitness and to live healthy lifestyles - because physical fitness is also a prerequisite for working well and safely!

Two achievements in 2008 show that we’re heading in the right direction. Firstly, E.ON was invited by the American Society of Safety Engineers to give a presentation to 6,000 attendees on the challenges facing the energy sector in implementing a safety culture. The feedback we received showed that we have already achieved a great deal within the eight years since our company was founded.

This was also confirmed by the results of a study carried out in 2008 by the British Safety Council (BSC), which is one of the world's largest non-governmental organizations promoting health, safety and environmental protection. In 2008, E.ON UK was invited by the organization as part of a study to present tools and programs for successfully implementing a safety culture.