Creating an inclusive work environment
Our diversity and inclusion (D&I) strategy is guided by our D&I Panel, a representative group made up of 19 men and women from across Tetra Pak. It has stated that increasing D&I provides the following benefits for the business:
- A competitive advantage: Strengthening our customer value proposition by offering a diverse team with perspectives that match the evolving needs of our customers and consumers
- A talent advantage: Maximising our performance by widening our access to talent, creating an environment where everyone is engaged and performs at their best
- A decision-making advantage: Leveraging the power of diverse perspectives and experiences to unlock creativity and performance; challenging ourselves to think and act differently.
With this business case in mind, we have created a "desired future state", which describes a respectful and inclusive work environment, company-wide engagement and dialogue around diversity and its value, and an organisation whose diversity reflects our business and consumers.
To help us achieve this desired future state, we focused our efforts on the following key areas in 2019:
- Building awareness and skills: We trained 750 leaders in inclusive leadership and we will continue this in 2020 to ensure that all our leaders have been reached. Feedback from these courses was very positive.
- Driving D&I actions: All our business organisations have built specific action plans around diversity and inclusion (D&I). Many of these focus on closing gaps in the area of women in leadership and providing growth opportunities for all. Clusters and market companies are also now systematically focusing on D&I to ensure that any specific local issues are addressed.
Measuring D&I performance
We measure D&I through our Diversity Dashboard and Inclusion Index. On our Diversity Dashboard, we are seeing some positive trends in gender diversity: we continue to see the number of women in leadership positions increasing; the percentage of women hires is trending up; and participation of women in learning is high. We also see the number of women in our talent pools slowly growing. Work is still needed, though, to bring about a step change, not least as the talent pool of women in sciences generally remains small.
On our Inclusion Index, which is based on our Employee Engagement survey results, we have not seen the progress that we wanted. Questions and comments alike point to areas where we need to increase focus in order to create an even more respectful environment. Consequently, we have identified six actions to address these areas going forward.
- Monitor KPIs and drive gap closure
- Communicate and engage on inclusion
- Build inclusive skills and behaviours
- Expand growth and development opportunities
- Attract diverse external talent
- Secure local focus, as required