Management Approach: People with Impact

Our employees are the driving force behind our success, and it is through their diverse ideas, backgrounds, and experiences that this success is built.

That is why we continuously strive for a diverse workforce, offering equal opportunities for every employee. The health, safety and well-being of our employees, partners and customers is of ongoing, critical importance, and we endeavor to reduce the number of accidents or incidents worldwide to zero. We care about the professional development of our employees, whether they work in our boardroom or at one of our factories. We believe it is important that everyone – no matter their role within the company – benefits from our values-based approach to learning and development and the investments we make in this. We are interdependent with our stakeholders and value highly their well-being and contribution to our success. That is why we promote social engagement with our local stakeholders as an important contribution to sustainable development in the communities where we are active.

How our activities impact our employees and local communities

By providing an increasingly inclusive work environment, we do our share in the fight against gender inequality and workplace discrimination. Thanks to personal and professional development opportunities as well as employee engagement, leadership, team spirit, and health and safety programs, we offer an attractive, safe and fair work environment where all our colleagues can succeed and prosper. Social engagement initatives with (local) stakeholders impact sustainable development in the communities in which we work.

How we manage People with Impact

Living our values

Guided by our values, we have been strengthening our unique company culture. Since 2019, we have been on a journey to develop specific behaviors that support and reflect our company values. We are now in the phase of inspiring our people to adopt behaviors that lead to high performance globally. This involves communicating our values and related behaviors through storytelling, posters, digital communications and with the Global Support Committee senior leadership team as Values Ambassadors.eastSee also Value activation journey

Fostering diversity

In 2021, we continued to foster an environment that prevents discrimination and thrives on diversity of individuals. Our initial focus is on gender diversity, for which we have defined ambitious goals. This includes extra efforts to recruit more women, especially on the managerial level. We also analyzed our internal equity, first on the global level with the result of finding no gender pay gap globally on the overall check and then more deeply on the local level, looking at comparable positions (with some findings for which we will define action plans). We also checked how the performance of women was evaluated during our evaluation process of people reviews and annual reviews and found they received higher marks than men on average.eastSee also Zero Discrimination Day

Employee Engagement Survey

In 2021, we conducted our 2^nd Global Engagement Survey with 94 percent worldwide participation. Scores on all items were up from the previous year (engagement, leadership, team efficiency, NPS). Key areas for improvement include conflict management. In response, we have developed two new trainings on how to identify and solve conflicts.eastSee also Employee Engagement Survey

‍The input from our group-wide Employee Engagement Survey provides the basis for our strong action plans to bring about sustainable change throughout our business. The aim is to ensure our employees thrive in a work environment and culture that benefit their development and well-being. Going forward, the survey is taking place every second year.

Leadership journey

We also kicked off our leadership journey for all people managers. This series of small training impulses aims to inspire the continuous development of leadership skills. We use the feedback from our engagement survey to prioritize training in the skills our leaders need most, starting with conflict management and soon to be followed by coaching.eastSee also Leadership journey

Learning and development

The last Beckers Employee Engagement Survey indicated that our employees would like more opportunities to develop. We started with the foundation of development: regular feedback through Check-In Conversations. These interactions contribute to a feedback culture characterized by dialogue and help define strengths and development areas as well as resolve and avoid issues and conflicts. We have managed to achieve an average of around 90 percent participation each quarter. All our people managers have been trained to conduct the check-ins, and strengthening their coaching skills regularly is part of our leadership journey.

Global Health & Safety Director

Beginning in 2021, we appointed a dedicated Global Health & Safety Director. In addition to establishing our COVID-19 hygiene routines, we are examining ways to more actively support our employees’ mental health, a topic that has been gaining attention in the public arena. Currently, we are piloting measures at our site in Malaysia to learn more about which approaches work best. On safety, we instituted behavior-based safety trainings and educated the organization on new, broader reporting principles. In France, where we currently have the biggest challenge in safety, we are setting up an extensive, dedicated action plan.eastSee also Behavior-based safety

Internal communication

Strengthening internal communication was another area of importance for us in 2021. We launched global town halls open to all employees that create transparency and dialogue across all levels. They feature presentations by the Executive Committee and Q&A sessions. And we kicked off the internal “True Colors campaign,” a global platform for employees’ sustainability stories. The initiative aims to bring diverse voices from across the Beckers workforce into the conversation to drive employees’ identification with sustainability.eastSee also Internal communication

Community engagement

To take a more active approach to community engagement that goes beyond philanthropy, we are implementing more systematic ways to support our local communities. With the goal of being a socially engaged business, we agreed on the global Common Cause of children & youth, and are in the process of selecting NGOs, charities and partners to work with actively in the future.eastSee also Common Cause engagement

Dialogue with our neighbors and active community engagement require well-developed plans. At Beckers, we are involved in a number of projects to support our communities. Our employees around the globe volunteered their time and money to support selected local initiatives. One of our biggest long-term projects is the partnership with Star for Life in South Africa, which motivates learners to invest in their schooling and overall well-being.eastSee also Global community engagement