For each of our RoadMap 2025 goals and targets, we have aligned an SDG sub-target to measurably address the issue.
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 and aquaculture, are the most important ambassadors of our employer brand.
During 2021, our employees continued to be significantly impacted by COVID-19. We saw the impact of further lockdowns, home-schooling, loss of social activities, and a strain on health systems and economies in the countries and communities where we operate. We were very proud of our people, who went the extra mile to ensure that our employees remained safe and received the support they needed to take care of themselves and their families.
Despite the COVID-19-related challenges, we continued to invest in our employees and focused on the following areas in 2021:
• Acquiring and investing in talent.
• Shaping leadership behaviours.
• Building a more diverse workforce.
• Acquiring and investing in talent.
During 2021, we further professionalised Nutreco’s people development strategy. We improved the quality of our regular people review and succession management processes, which covers more than 126 senior positions, resulting in qualitative succession plans and concrete development actions for our future leaders. In addition, we put in place succession plans for a total of 1,062 positions.
Shaping leadership behaviours
In terms of learning and leadership development, we extended the functionality of Workday as our go-to learning platform, serving as the infrastructure for the delivery of numerous virtual functional and behavioural learnings, available for employees at all levels in the organisation.
Building a more outward looking and diverse culture
At Nutreco, we believe that diverse and inclusive teams have greater problem-solving capabilities, make better decisions and ultimately perform better. By promoting a diverse and inclusive working environment, we not only ensure that our workforce represents the world we operate in, but that we have access to the entire pool of available talent – something that is particularly relevant in today’s tight labour market.
We continue to focus on three key areas: balanced gender representation, increased nationality representation and a culture that promotes inclusion.
We promote a diverse and inclusive work environment.
During 2021, we increased awareness of diversity and inclusion with global events, employee video testimonials and regular communications. A total of 127 female colleagues took part in Taking the Stage – our women-only programme that not only strengthens leadership through effective communication but establishes female networks and role models.
We attribute our positive performance in 2021 across the organisation to the work of local Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Councils and strong CEO and Management Board engagement. These efforts will be further strengthened in 2022 with a global D&I Taskforce.
We commit to offering equal pay and remuneration to men and women who have the same job requirements and possess the same skills and experience. In 2021, we performed an in-depth gender pay gap study across all our employees and locations. The findings have been shared with our countries and will be used to meet local equal pay reporting requirements, to improve our recruiting and promotion policies and practices and to create new awareness and training in close alignment with our Diversity & Inclusion agenda.
Our ambition is to have 30% of our senior management positions held by women by 2025. Our progress to date is positive, increasing from 21% to 23% in 2021. To ensure we reach our ambition, we have decided to increase our target on external recruitment of women.
We continued our strong performance on diversity of nationality. In 2021, more than 80% of our management teams featured more than one nationality. We also grew the number of nationalities represented across our business to 101.
In 2020, we established a method to measure inclusion – the Nutreco Inclusion Index – and, in 2021, we conducted the measurement for the first time. Our Inclusion Index was created together with our parent company SHV and the other SHV Groups.
The index combines the results when we ask employees to respond with how much they agree or disagree with five statements:
The results were very positive, coming in at 8.2 on a scale of 1-10, and provided an opportunity to drill down and create action plans for improvement at a local level. Every quarter, each country’s businesses are requested to provide an update on their action plans during our quarterly Business Review Meetings.
