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.
Based on our materiality assessment, we have categorized ➜ our material topics. In the stream People with Impact, we strive for diverse, motivated, and empowered employees and encourage each and every one – no matter their role in our company – to learn and grow. As the ➜ safety and well-being of our employees, partners and customers is crucial for us, we take the promotion of a safe and healthy work environment very seriously and support it actively. Finally, we advance ➜ social engagement with our local stakeholders to support sustainable development in their communities.
“We embrace DEI on all levels and live an inclusive culture where everyone can be authentic, feel valued and has the chance to thrive every day. Together, we continuously widen our focus and learn how to become better allies.”
Our employees and all the people who work with us are the driving force behind our success. It is through their diverse ideas, backgrounds and experiences that we build this success. Beckers embraces diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI): by fostering a sense of belonging, we aim to create an inclusive culture where everyone can be authentic, feel valued and have the chance to thrive every day. Building on our achievements in promoting gender equality, we continue to widen our focus and learn how to become allies to all underrepresented groups.
Our goal is to develop an inclusive, gender-balanced organization with highly motivated and empowered employees. We have set goals for 2030, which were further enhanced in 2022. We removed the gender ratio of 40-60 to include all genders. In particular, we strive for an increased percentage of women with more than 31 percent female employees in total and over 40 percent female executives.
For further information on our 2030 sustainability goals, click here.
We motivate our employees to seek continuous growth and improvement. The engagement of our employees in line with the scores of top-performing companies is an important goal for us. This is a moving target which we track via KPIs for enagement, leadership and team efficiency and the employee Net Promoter Score through our employee survey that takes place every two years. Engagement is tracked via targets for the survey participation rate, and the improvement actions stemming from the workshops that address the results of the employee survey. Our feedback culture with regular one-on-one Check-In Conversations between every employee and their manager is an essential part of our employee engagement effort. Here, we aim for a completion rate of 80 percent.
At Beckers, we value every employee equally and actively promote an increasingly inclusive work environment with zero discrimination, equal opportunities and gender balance. We are aware of the possible risks of workplace discrimination and accompanying challenges, and we take a strong stance on these issues, condemning all forms of discrimination.
In 2022, we took our work with diversity, equity and inclusion to the next level, building on our 2021 achievements evident in an analysis of our internal equity on a global and local level. We dealt with minor findings in our internal gender pay gap analysis and prepared a more equitable pay grading system based on external data. We aim to create a living wage methodology, because we see that no established solutions are currently available in a number of markets.
Education and learning is a central topic for Beckers. Our focus in 2022 was on continuing our leadership journey, an open offer for all to participate in regular learning modules about leadership topics. We define the topics based on data from our Engagement Survey or pulse checks during our townhalls to make sure we are addressing the right needs. The modules launched so far are Team and Work Efficiency, Coaching Skills, Emotional Intelligence, Conflict Management, and Resilience. We have also established a dedicated microsite on our global intranet to make the content accessible to everyone on demand and provide the opportunity for continual learning.
Additionally, we launched the Beckers Good Practice Knowledge Hub in 2022: a central resource where Beckers sites can look for solutions from other sites and find help with specific problems. The purpose of the Knowledge Hub is to focus resources and experience the benefits of the global Beckers organization, while enabling and empowering local autonomy.
➜ Our People Sustainability Pyramid defines our long-term ambition for people sustainability for 2030 and beyond. It is inspired by the classical model of Maslow’s pyramid of human needs and was adapted to our company. It includes the levers of foundation, physiological needs, safety needs, love & belonging, esteem and self-actualization, with diversity, equity and inclusion as a driver for all levers. We have defined ambitions for all levers and are starting to implement the first steps to realize them.
In global workshops, we analyzed and mapped ideas according to our People Sustainability Pyramid and introduced the concept of allyship at Beckers. Allies are persons who understand their own privilege and use it to enable others. In dedicated workshops, we created awareness and empowered our people to use their own positions to become allies for less privileged people. We first piloted a local workshop in Italy and the UK and then rolled the workshop out globally. After that, countries built their own action plans by choosing two levers of the People Sustainability Pyramid to start their activities. We are convinced that the mindset of allyship, as it speaks to the heart, has a bigger impact than traditional training.
We hold a twice-yearly global Engagement Survey. The last one took place in 2021, after which we analyzed the results in team workshops and built action plans in 2022. We will conduct the next Engagement Survey in 2023. Our aim is to get deeper data on all sustainability efforts and, if possible, benchmark data for that as well. We also have a number of other concepts and programs to stay in touch with our employees. For instance, we bolster
➜ internal communication through various communication channels to foster sustainability across our company, and we have established work councils and regular social dialogue.
Our values are protected as an essential element of ➜ our Code of Conduct and are expanded in the Code of Conduct appendices, including the ➜ Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the ➜ Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the ➜ UN Ten Principles of the United Nations Global Compact. We have further internal guidelines such as our anti-discrimination and harassment policy.
Moreover, we communicate our values and related behaviors through storytelling, posters, digital communications and with the Global Support Committee senior leadership team as
Our actions contribute to the achievement of the ➜ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) quality education (SDG 4), gender equality (SDG 5), decent work and economic growth (SDG 8), reduced inequalities (SDG 10) and responsible consumption and production (SDG 12) as we encourage growth, education, diversity and equality within and outside our company.
For further information on the SDGs, click here
