Social responsibility for Novo Nordisk is about caring for people. This applies to our employees and the people whose healthcare needs we serve. It also considers the impact of our business on the global society and the local community. As such, social responsibility is more than a virtue – it is a business imperative. It is an investment in our future.

In our actions and decisions, we strive to act on our commitment as a corporate citizen. In this section, we present examples of how we translate social responsibility into practice. We highlight three important groups of stakeholders: people with diabetes, our employees, and the broad spectrum of civil society engaged in the debate on issues affecting our business. In a global context, the most critical social issue in terms of our future business development is the ‘right to health’. Our main responsibility is towards people with diabetes and other healthcare needs that our company serves. With our aspiration to defeat diabetes, we invest concerted efforts in improving education and access to diabetes care. We focus particularly on developing countries, where dramatic growth in the numbers of people with diabetes calls for urgent action. Our aim is to build our business on a model for sustainable diabetes care. This focus on ‘being there’ reverberates throughout the organisation. Embedded in our employees’ daily work is a sense of responsibility towards the people who depend on our products and towards other stakeholders. Through a constant drive to improve the quality of our products – in terms of safety, efficacy, convenience and environment- friendliness – we make it easier to live with diabetes. Our understanding of people’s needs for care builds on years of dialogue with healthcare professionals, patient organisations, governments as well as thousands of individuals with diabetes. The international DAWN study has added new dimensions, now being built into future care solutions.

To be an attractive workplace we make investments in health and safety, in training and people development. Fair remuneration, reward schemes and attractive benefits are part of our offering to employees. We have also set out to promote equal opportunities systematically, with mandatory action plans for each business area. This is done in recognition that diversity nurtures a healthy business development, and that a winning culture is about staying competitive through innovation. These are the basic ingredients of the Novo Nordisk People Strategy. Social responsibility extends beyond the company’s grounds. It reaches throughout the supply chain and to the global agenda of sustainable development. Public acceptance of genetic engineering, the ethics of clinical research, R&D priorities, and the use of animals for experimentation and testing are examples
of critical social issues. As a pharmaceutical company we acknowledge that our activities are in areas where values and ethics are constantly tested. At the core of these issues lies our fundamental approach to doing business. Underpinning every decision is the belief that  our values must be expressed in all our actions. Business ethics are about decency and empathy. We strive to find the right balance between compassion and competitiveness, the short and the long term, self and commitment to colleagues and society, work and family life. This is not an easy task, but rather a constant challenge. If we succeed, we have made our business case.