Human Resources

ALTANA is a highly innovative globally leading specialty chemicals company. Of overriding importance for the company’s success is our most important resource, our employees, who are motivated and dedicated and have above-average qualifications. They are committed to the respectful corporate culture defined in ALTANA’s Guiding Principles, which is informed by our four central values: appreciation, openness, empowerment to act, and trust. As an attractive employer, we offer our some 6,500 employees around the world individualized further training opportunities and promote their professional development in a targeted manner. In order to do justice to advancing digitalization, in the year under review we included further education and training measures in the ALTANA further education and training catalog that train employees in new digital applications. In addition, in the course of the HR transformation project and the associated introduction of the human resource management tool SuccessFactors, employees can increasingly control their own profile digitally on their own responsibility and independently.

To ensure that the company remains highly competitive in globalized sales markets, a primary focus of the ALTANA Group’s human resource strategy is to secure young talent. Special emphasis is placed on consistent and global promotion of internal talent. We consider the continuous optimization of human resource development programs, close monitoring of talent, and the identification of development measures and perspectives to be key factors in this regard. To make human resource development at ALTANA more transparent, we developed the so-called Talent Cycle in the 2019 reporting year. This annually recurring process includes identification and selection of talent for internal successions, as well as the selection of participants for development programs. The focus is on the progress dialogue, which was revised in 2019. It includes a comprehensive development plan, as well as an assessment of each employee’s skills by a manager and feedback from the employee to the manager. Employees and managers are encouraged to exchange information at eye level and jointly define the employee’s development path in open dialogue. Constructive feedback and support are the top priorities. The basis for the new progress dialogue, the global introduction of which will be completed by the beginning of 2021, is the competence model that was already introduced in 2018. In order to focus on the internal exchange and global networking of our managers, we support our employees’ development through internal personnel development programs. In the 2019 reporting year, one of our international Management Development Programs and a regional development program in Europe were successfully completed. Most of the participating managers took on more responsibility during or after the programs, either globally or cross-divisionally. This illustrates the success of the programs as an important component of talent management. In the year under review, programs for Europe and the Americas were launched. The Advanced Leadership Program (ALP), first launched in 2018, was completed at the beginning of this year (2020).

Diversity in leadership positions is an important goal of our Keep Changing Agenda. At the end of 2019, 29.8 percent of our employees in Germany and 21.9 percent of our managers there were women. ALTANA’s medium- to long-term goal is to increase the share of women in leadership positions to the percentage of women in the company’s total workforce.

The initiative LEADING WOMEN @ ALTANA is providing important impetus. It includes a mentoring program for women that prepares women who have potential for a possible leadership role and accompanies women who have taken on a leadership role for the first time. The mentoring program makes an important contribution toward increasing the share of women in leadership positions.

To this end, teams consisting of a mentee and a mentor meet regularly over a period of twelve months. The mentor shares his or her knowledge and experience with the mentee. On account of the success, ALTANA continued the mentoring project in 2019 with 28 new tandems across its sites in Germany. At present, the company is examining whether to extend the program to other European countries.

Our recruitment activities received a number of awards in 2019. ALTANA received top results regarding online recruiting channels from BEST RECRUITERS and the Potentialpark study. In addition, we again received the “MINT-Minded Company” for 2019. This award is presented by audimax MEDIEN GmbH in cooperation with the MINT Zukunft schaffen initiative. The initiative honors companies that provide special support to young talent in the fields of mathematics, informatics, natural sciences, and technology.

For the recruitment of young talent, the ALTANA Group has relied for years on cooperation with institutes of higher education. Particularly noteworthy is its close cooperation with the Young Chemists Forum (JCF), a scientific association for chemistry students and doctoral candidates. In the year under review, ALTANA was in close contact with various regional forums of the JCF, which organized various events including seminars, excursions, job exchanges, and conferences lasting several days. ALTANA also took part in the JCF Spring Symposium in Bremen attended by more than 300 participants from the university chemistry landscape. In an international context, ALTANA participated in 2019 for the first time in the ChemSkillDays in Salzburg, organized by young chemists from Austria and Germany. At this event, we presented ourselves to around 40 students at a workshop on sustainability and project management.

For the tenth time, in the year under review ALTANA supported students majoring in MINT fields and in human resource management with a Deutschlandstipendium. The 27 recipients not only received financial support, but could also personally experience ALTANA within the framework of various events, enable themselves to be considered for internships and degree theses, take advantage of mentoring offers or take part in specialist seminars.

As part of the ALTANA Group’s web design project, the ALTANA career website was revised and made more customer-oriented, user-friendly, and modern.