Alkermes Approach to Corporate Responsibility
Originally published in Alkermes 2021 Corporate Responsibility Report
OUR APPROACH TO CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY
Stakeholder Engagement
We recognize that our stakeholders – including employees, healthcare providers, patients, caregivers, investors, policy makers, members of the communities where we live and work, and others – are part of a single community and affect one another. We seek to engage with as many of these stakeholders as we can, so that our approach to the development and commercialization of our medicines is informed and enriched by their perspectives and supportive of their needs.
As an example, we work closely with patient and advocacy organizations to better understand their goals, and we collaborate with such organizations to raise awareness of patient needs, advance patient-centered drug development and increase access to medicines and other forms of treatment in support of patient health and well-being. The perspectives gleaned from this advocacy work inform our R&D activities and our clinical trial designs.
We engage with our employees and recognize how integral they are to the success and sustainability of our organization. Leadership from our management team and broad workforce participation in our corporate responsibility initiatives help to sustain our culture of collaboration, compliance, and trust as we strive to proactively reduce risk, drive awareness and improvement of our environmental impacts, and maintain workplaces that are protective of the health and well-being of our employees.
We are also committed to engagement with our shareholders and other stakeholders to solicit and better understand their insights on our business and our ESG activities. In this context, in late 2021 and early 2022, we reached out to shareholders who collectively held approximately 80% of our outstanding shares to request engagement meetings, which resulted in meetings with shareholders who collectively held more than 65% of our outstanding shares to discuss their feedback on business and governance matters of importance to them, including corporate responsibility and sustainability. Feedback from these meetings was discussed with management and relayed to our Board of Directors (the "Board”) and the committees of the Board, as appropriate. Following careful consideration of feedback received, and taking into account the evolving needs of our business, our management and Board took several actions to further strengthen our business, our corporate governance practices and our executive compensation programs, as outlined in greater detail in our proxy statement for our 2022 annual general meeting of shareholders, which is available on the SEC Filings page of the Investors section of our website.
Operating and Growing Responsibly
Corporate responsibility is inherent in our mission as an organization that actively works to support people living with opioid dependence, alcohol dependence, schizophrenia or bipolar I disorder and tries to help break down barriers that prevent people from accessing care. As we do this important work, we strive to manage our business in a manner that promotes transparent governance and strong ethics; maintains extensive patient, employee and other stakeholder engagement; and helps us grow our organization strategically, sustainably and responsibly, including with respect to our ESG impacts. The following ESG pillars are deeply integrated into our business, and we continued to formalize our commitment to these pillars with the inclusion of goals related to corporate responsibility in the Company’s annual corporate objectives and corresponding annual incentive compensation plan for both 2021 and 2022.
Environment: We think broadly about our commitment to responsible environmental stewardship. We have implemented enterprise-wide Environmental, Health, Safety and Security (EHSS) risk initiatives and management strategies designed to mitigate or reduce risk, protect employee health and safety, minimize our environmental impacts and enhance the sustainability of our operations.
Social: We approach our societal impacts from the insideout. We start by fostering a creative and collaborative workplace culture in which employees have access to resources and support that can help them thrive personally and professionally. Beyond our internal operations, our patient-centered approach drives our external-facing efforts such as our patient engagement and advocacy activities, support of employee volunteerism in local communities, and our corporate grant programs, which seek to help address some of the complex challenges faced by patient communities in our therapeutic areas of focus.
Governance: We govern our organization through strong ethics and corporate governance practices, comprehensive management and Board oversight of our business and operations, compliance with applicable laws and ongoing engagement with internal and external stakeholders. Our governance policies and practices are designed to support risk mitigation, enhance the security of our people and information, maintain our commitment to product quality and patient safety and encourage each person at our organization to play a role in helping our business grow in a strategic, efficient, compliant and sustainable manner.
