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Human Resources
ALTANA gears its activities to long-term and sustainable growth. We can only achieve this goal together with our competent and committed employees. We therefore promote the professional development of our staff, prepare them for leadership positions, and enable them to participate in the company’s success. Furthermore, we put particular emphasis on the recruitment of young talent, specialists, and managers. Our corporate culture has once again proven its worth in coping with the coronavirus pandemic and supports the establishment of a New Normal after the pandemic ends.
Challenges Mastered Together in 2021
Of overriding importance for ALTANA’s corporate success are its highly qualified, motivated, and dedicated employees. They are our most important resource. So during the coronavirus pandemic it was all the more important to continue to ensure the health and performance of each individual in the second year of the pandemic. While many colleagues worked primarily from home, the teams in the laboratories, production, and logistics ensured on-site operations.
Between Pandemic and New Normal
Even though the pandemic continued, in 2021 ALTANA was already intensively engaged in designing a new normality consisting of on-site and mobile work after the pandemic. The company sees the New Normal above all as an opportunity to expand its position as a future-oriented, modern employer. Our corporate culture, with its values of appreciation, openness, empowerment to act, and trust, contributes to this. To do justice to the complexity of the issue, the company’s worldwide management was called upon to develop sustainable concepts in line with local conditions, as the respective legal, site-specific, and activity-related framework conditions can vary widely. This culture of hybrid work will continue to accompany us in the coming years and will have to be regularly adapted to current internal and external circumstances.
HR Transformation
We are also aligning our HR processes with a view to the future. As part of the HR Transformation project launched in 2018, we successfully completed the first key project phase in the spring of 2021. As a result, all HR master data have been brought together in a leading HR management system (SAP SuccessFactors). This enables ALTANA to simplify reporting, for example, and to involve the entire workforce in our HR processes – an important foundation for the project’s overall objective of rethinking overarching HR processes, improving established processes, and connecting the HR community more closely.
Furthermore, in the course of the global rollout of SuccessFactors, the interface for transferring employee data to IT was significantly improved. Consequently, data maintenance can be simplified, multiple maintenance avoided, and significantly higher data quality achieved.
For the penetration of processes, it is of utmost importance that all employees have the equal opportunity to use digital media. For this reason, we also provided IT access to people who do not need a personalized user account for their daily work. Around 480 additional user accounts were generated and made available to colleagues.
The implementation of a global learning platform, which had been driven forward in the previous year, was successfully completed in 2021. In the year under review, we made global e-learning available to our workforce on the learning platform and assigned target group-specific training courses to employees.
Talent Management
We reached another important milestone by implementing a global, system-supported Talent Cycle. The realignment of our annual employee appraisal based on the competency model adapted in 2019 is an important building block for ALTANA-wide talent management.
The Talent Cycle enables all colleagues equally to receive transparent feedback on the competencies that are important to ALTANA, so that everyone’s personal strengths and fields of development can be clearly identified. In this way, we want to further promote continuous exchange between employees and their managers – across all sites, in a globally uniform way, and thus transparently for everyone involved. To ensure full implementation of this new process, all employees have access to e-learning and various user videos. In addition, all managers in the company received special training on this topic.
Women in Management Positions
To further increase the share of women in management positions, we are continuing to implement the LEADING WOMEN @ ALTANA initiative in Germany. The initiative includes a mentoring program 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 twelve-month program involves teams of two consisting of a mentee and a mentor who meet at regular intervals. During the meetings, the male or female mentor shares his or her knowledge and experience with the mentee.
ALTANA’s medium- to long-term goal is to increase the proportion of women in management positions throughout the ALTANA Group to the percentage that corresponds to the share of women in the worldwide workforce.
Virtual Employer Branding
Despite the pandemic-related restrictions, we continued to push forward our external recruiting activities. With creativity and the use of innovative technology, we designed 3D tours of our company and participated in several virtual career fairs. Our commitment is even recognized outside ALTANA. For example, we finished first in the overall ranking in the BEST RECRUITER competition among more than 400 top employers in Germany. The award confirms that the projects we initiated in recent years are bearing fruit and that we are meeting applicants’ expectations.