The social dimension of sustainable development is about people. For Novo Nordisk it challenges us to understand better how we affect people's lives, and on this basis to reconsider the opportunities and responsibilities that underpin our business approach.

We employ approximately 15,000 people and thousands more people are affected by or affect Novo Nordisk. These are our stakeholders. It is an enormous task just to describe the ways in which these people are affected by their relationships with the company ­ and how they affect us. It is an even greater challenge to mould this understanding into strategy and practice. We needed to start with something manageable and of practical use.

Our starting point ­ our people
In deciding where to start, we turned to 'Vision21' and our 'Values in Action' project, a process in which a cross-organisational group of employees was asked to review Novo Nordisk's performance. They looked at how we handled environmental, bioethical and social issues as well as business ethics in general with regard to our core values.

Central to both Vision21 and Values in Action is the focus on our values in guiding our decisions and actions. Also common to both is a clear understanding of the importance of our employees in ensuring that our values work in practice. Given this, we decided to focus first on employees when addressing the social dimension of sustainable development.

The structure of the report
The core of our approach to this first period of 'social accounting' has been to map out the basic facts of how we deal with employees. The view was that this was needed in order to begin a dialogue with employees and indeed other stakeholders in the future.

The report has been divided into four main parts. The first section covers health, safety and working conditions. We start here because we consider these to be fundamental obligations to our employees that we must fulfil no matter what else we do. Next we look at development and performance because if we want to grow our business, we need to create the right conditions for our people to grow. Of course, we don't just make an impact on our own people. The third section explores our interaction with society. Here we set out our plans for strengthening our approach to human rights. The fourth and final section is a case study on China ­ a major market for us where we have established research and production facilities as well as sales offices, and a country that we are aware stakeholders put under scrutiny. We look at China from the three above-mentioned perspectives that form the framework of the report.

A case approach with a Danish bias
We have identified what appeared to us to be good examples of our approaches to social responsibility. The advantage of using cases is that they give real-life examples and allow us to go beyond the cold facts of specific activities and programmes. The disadvantage, which we recognise, is that some of the cases have been chosen as 'show-cases' and are not fully representative of Novo Nordisk's overall performance. Even so, we hope they will not be seen as boastful but as a source of inspiration and learning for people inside and outside our organisation.

Most cases have been drawn from the Danish context. About 60% of our employees are in Denmark, and our Danish operations form the hub of the company and the root of its values. We have therefore concentrated mainly on these employees. The expansion of Novo Nordisk, however, takes place almost entirely outside of Denmark. We have production, research facilities and/or sales offices in 61 countries. To begin to take account of this, we have explored Novo Nordisk's operations in Brazil, Bulgaria, and China for this year's report.

From Vision21 to reality
We have tried to clarify for each section of the report the relationship between our values as encapsulated in Vision21, our policies, systems and methods, and our practices. In some instances we have found our policies to be lacking, for example in the area of human rights. In these instances, we have highlighted the shortfall and made public commitments to close these gaps in the future.

We also found that we were unable to fully report on our performance using key social indicators, such as various international health and safety statistics. The reasons for this were a lack of data or viable methods to collect and analyse it.

Our aim is also to benchmark ourselves but all too often external benchmarks were not available.

The next step
This social report is the first step in understanding what we mean by social responsibility in practice, and ultimately how social responsibility can be managed effectively as part of a core business process aligned to the principles of sustainable development.

We expect that the dialogue initiated through the publication of this report will broaden our understanding of what needs to be covered in future cycles, and how. We plan to publish a social report each year so you can follow our progress. As you can read from our objectives and targets, we are committed to both broadening and deepening our social accounting and reporting in the coming years.