3.1 Our team

One of the cornerstones of Nutreco’s strategy is to employ talented and passionate professionals. Our committed employees, who feel proud to work for a global leader in animal nutrition, are the most important ambassadors of our brand.

During 2020, our employees were significantly challenged by COVID-19. We also saw the devastating impact of this pandemic on the local communities, health systems and economies in the countries that we operate. As such, we are proud of those Nutreco people who went the extra mile to ensure that fellow employees remained safe and got the support needed to take care of themselves and their families.

Still, and partly because of the impact of COVID-19, we continued to invest in our employees and managers last year through the following focus areas:

Acquiring and investing in talent

During 2020, Nutreco further professionalised its talent management strategy, including making our talent review and succession management processes, which cover over 100 senior positions, more focused and efficient. Part of this also included establishing quality development plans for employees and ensuring actionable leadership succession plans.

Because developing people starts at the early career stage, we have implemented a framework which enables our emerging talents to develop in a structured and focused way. This framework provides career guidance in seven career paths, providing emerging talents with challenging career opportunities and their managers with the tools to guide them in their careers.

To achieve our 2024 target to be the place to work for the best people in our industry, we also focus on getting the right people in. In 2020, we started to build a dedicated career site, which will provide candidates with a platform to find stories and see the potential journey ahead within our organisation. We are currently piloting this career site in our global offices, and from there, we will expand to the rest of the world.

Shaping leadership behaviours

In terms of learning and leadership development, we have established a state-of-the-art learning platform, which serves as infrastructure for delivery of numerous virtual functional and behavioural learnings, available for employees at all levels in the organisation.

Furthermore, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, we delivered virtual leadership development programmes; one programme specifically for females with leadership ambitions (60 participants); and SHV-delivered programmes in which 15 high-potential future leaders participated. We also engaged a virtual coaching company, providing employees with the opportunity to connect with a coach to develop themselves on an individual basis.

We are actively seeking to align our leadership behaviour with our long-term company goals. As such, we have approved a new long-term incentive plan that will be in place in 2021, and which includes several sustainability targets that will have significant weighting, including addressing greenhouse gas emissions and reducing antibiotic use.

Customer intimacy and innovation

We continue to see rapid changes in both our client demands and market dynamics. In 2020, we started a strategic initiative called “From Great to Growth” to further strengthen our client-serving capabilities. This was launched by our animal nutrition division Trouw Nutrition at a global summit early 2020, and was followed by a virtual collaborative training programme, developed in close cooperation with external training partners. This programme is driving a change in customer understanding by using a blend of online training, integration in daily live management coaching and knowledge sharing. In our aquaculture division Skretting we started the Commercial Excellence initiative. In 2020, Skretting piloted an initiative called Commercial Excellence (CXL). CXL was initiated to address the recommendations from the Salmonid Deep Dive 2018 strategy exercise, andwas linked to the strategic goal of addressing the salmonid business margin erosion. The CXL pilot had a “bottom up” approach, where individual OpCos defined their commercial improvement projects which, after approval by the division CEO, were coached by internal and external teams to identify the relevant KPI’s. The primary objective was to leverage our trusted advisor capabilities, thereby enabling value-added sales. In 2020, the CXL pilot was joined by four of our OpCos.

We are also enforcing a long-term client perspective by aligning our short-term incentive schemes with our customer needs. Furthermore, we have deployed a Sales Incentive Framework, covering certain sales groups, to balance pay and sales performance against our customer- product strategy.

Building a more outward looking and diverse culture

We believe that having diverse teams leads to better decision making and heightened performance. By promoting a diverse and inclusive working environment, we will ensure that our workforce represents the world that we operate in. In 2020, we appointed a female leader as CEO of our animal nutrition business, bringing the proportion of females in our Nutreco Executive Leadership Team to 33%. In our core group of 108 senior leaders, 43% appointments made in 2020 were female, leading to an improved gender balance of 28% females in the group.

Looking at our talent pipelines, more than half (54%) of our emerging talents are female, making us well positioned to achieve our longer-term diversity and inclusion (D&I) targets.

Of our 21 senior leadership teams, 86% consist of more than one nationality. Throughout the organisation, we deem having culturally diverse teams as “business as usual”. This is something that we are proud of and which we intend to maintain in the future.

We offer programmes that support achieving our D&I ambition, including one focused on strengthening leadership behaviour for all females in our organisation, an inclusive leadership journey for leaders, and a Cultural Awareness Programme designed to help our employees to understand, communicate and collaborate with different cultures.

We commit to equal pay and remuneration for men and women that have the same job requirements and possess the same skills and experience. In Q2 of 2021, we will undertake an in-depth gender pay gap study across all our employees and locations, and any findings will be used to improve our recruiting and promotion policies and practices, and to create new awareness and training in close alignment with our D&I agenda.

Fostering health and well-being

Several initiatives have been executed to help employees to build awareness of healthy habits and invest in their well-being. For instance, this included the Fit for the Future programme, which was available to employees in the Netherlands, that balanced mental and physical health awareness with a focus on employees working from home. It offered a variety of activities, from ergonomics to yoga, lunch walks, and food and sleep awareness training.

Enhance digitalisation and working from home

Within the HR function, we strive to further optimise and digitalise our processes to create efficiencies, to gain people insights and services for the business. As of Q1 2020, we started providing quarterly insights relating to our employee trends and patterns – aimed at helping our Leadership Team make people-related decisions. Similarly, we have increased manager self-service adoption on our global HR system from 10% to over 70% by the end of 2020, providing them with team insights and enabling them to take direct actions.

In 2020, we also launched the Smart Workplace concept, a complete set of up-to-date, easy-to-use tools that enable all employees to connect, collaborate and manage information efficiently. Driven by the developments around COVID-19, we’ve launched extensive training sessions for all employees on the use of video conferencing, document storage and collaboration tools.

“I would like to stress that for myself and many of my colleagues WFH (working from home) was a new experience, it required a stretch and adaptation. Those are important learnings, which none of us expected to get during 2020."