Bacardi Limited is the largest privately held spirits company in the world. The Company produces and markets a variety of super premium and premium spirits that are distributed and sold globally. We are committed to managing our operations responsibly to benefit our people, consumers, customers, suppliers, local communities and to protect the environment.

Throughout its businesses, Bacardi has a heritage of fostering teams of dedicated employees. This trait can be traced back through the 147 year history of Bacardi and the family support for the business. We believe that how our people are treated and valued directly relates to our success. Our ability to achieve our corporate responsibility objectives depends on how well our people understand our vision and practice high ethical standards in the workplace.

Global Teamwork Initiative

More than 6,500 people work for the Company around the world. During the last financial year, the Bacardi senior leadership team has reviewed how it could best reinforce the spirit and practices of teamwork in line with our vision and purpose. The outcome has been the creation of cross-functional teams to tackle a series of strategic initiatives under the “One Bacardi” umbrella that will make us a more effective and successful global company leveraging our uniqueness, our heritage and our people.

Development And Training

One of these cross-functional teams has identified how to establish and embed a way of working in a matrix organization that will allow us to operate as a high-performing team.

This concept was first developed in Bacardi U.S.A., which used “alignment” workshops to build employee engagement. It has been so successful that it will become a core development program for Bacardi worldwide in fiscal 2010.

Employee Rights And Responsibilities

Our high employee retention rate is evidence that Bacardi has a long tradition of treating employees fairly. However, from time to time, we have needed to restructure and redeploy resources, which has in some cases led to redundancies. To support our employees at such times, Bacardi provides appropriate and generous severance packages, as well as offering outplacement employment services.

Last year we managed the closure of one facility: Bahamas. We took special care to work closely with employees on transition plans.

Communication

Bacardi believes in building greater engagement through improved communication. During fiscal 2009, our new CEO held two global webcasts. In these webcasts, the CEO discussed business performance and short- and long-term priorities, as well as dealing directly with various questions raised by employees. These webcasts will continue on a regular basis and have started to incorporate improvements in format as a direct result of employee feedback.

Surveying employees’ views can provide valuable feedback to management. For example, last year our whisky operation in Scotland carried out an in-depth attitude survey. It found that employees had a strong personal commitment to continuous improvement and clarity around roles and expectations. Areas to improve upon included communication and training. Together with the staff, senior executives created action plans to address the shortcomings identified in the survey.