Össur Leads From The Front

The United Nation’s theme this year for International Women’s Day is ‘For ALL women and girls: Rights. Equality. Empowerment’, and I believe that this is something that we uphold throughout our organisation. It fits with our sustainability strategy ‘Responsible for Tomorrow’, plus Össur committed to the UN Women’s Empowerment Principles way back in 2014.  Össur has also just been recognised as one of the World’s Best Companies in Sustainable Growth by Time magazine, which really recognised our commitment to being Responsible for Tomorrow. 

Össur is an Icelandic company, a country considered one of the most gender equal in the world. We know from our colleagues in Iceland that since 1975 they have an annual Women’s Day Off, an event when all women and non-binary people strike from work and unpaid labour, and protest against the gender pay gap and gender-based violence. Össur supports this and all our female Icelandic colleagues take part, and this belief in fairness really does, I believe, underpin our work culture globally. 

We are working towards an even split of males and females in our workplace. In 2024 we had a 51:49 male-to-female ratio of colleagues across our 4000 employees worldwide, 40% of management was female, and three out of six of our board of directors were female. We prioritise the wellbeing and work-life balance of our employees by offering enhanced family-friendly policies and we explore flexible work arrangements for roles that can be performed remotely. This flexibility and our supportive policies allow all employees to manage their work and personal lives, which can often be a juggling act for women, particularly those with caring responsibilities!  

Last year, across North Europe, we brought in a programme on Menopause Awareness after this was championed by one of our colleagues. It started as an informal coffee and a chat hour to share and learn from each other but evolved into investment into an educational package available in our internal learning portal, that we encouraged all our colleagues to attend, not just the females. We know that men can be indirectly affected by the menopause too and as we look after all our colleagues, we wanted to make it easier for them too to explore how they may be able to support the women in their lives better.  

In addition, we’ve recently brought in mandatory training for all our leaders in the UK on sexual harassment prevention and discrimination in the workplace. We have a responsibility to protect our colleagues and to make sure they are safe, wherever they happen to be working. This awareness education is being rolled out to every UK employee this week. 

As part of our recruitment efforts, we try to ensure that our vacancies reach all corners of the workforce and have taken time to look at for example the language that is used in advertising and interviewing to ensure this is not unconsciously biased.  For example, we know that some words have a stereotypical male perception which could subconsciously discourage a great female candidate from applying. Our upper limb manufacturing and development site in Livingston, Scotland regularly hosts work experience and intern students, which have predominately been female, and we hope that in doing this, we inspire them early into a career in manufacturing, engineering, or another STEM subject and continue through this for our future talent pool of engineers!