ALTANA’s Employees:
Our Most Important Asset
As a highly innovative specialty chemicals company, our most
important asset is our employees. The some 6,000 women
and men working for ALTANA companies worldwide demonstrate
above-average qualifications and commitment. The
culture of our group, defined in ALTANA’s
Guiding Principles,
is informed by our four central values: openness, trust, appreciation,
and empowerment to act.
ALTANA offers its employees further training opportunities,
promotes their professional development in a targeted
manner, and supports their health with special preventive
measures. This helps make us a more attractive employer.
New Processes in Human Resource
Development
With the Keep Changing Agenda for the future, ALTANA
has defined new milestones for the Group’s human-resource
strategy, among many other aspects. One of them is our target
of filling 70 % of all management positions worldwide
internally as of 2020.
To achieve this goal, we are harmonizing our global
human resource development and the related selection processes.
This development is reflected by the fact that in
the future we will offer our several-months-long Development
Program (DP) for management trainees only in English.
The DPs in the national languages specifically for Chinese
or German employees will be included in the programs
for Asia and Europe, respectively. Starting in 2017, all managers
in the vast regions of Europe, Asia, and the Americas
will prepare for their future positions together across countries.
With the ALTANA Management Challenge (AMC), the
Group created a globally uniform assessment instrument for
selecting
management trainees. The basis for the one-day
presence seminar with practical examples and role play was
developed in Germany and subsequently adapted by local
experts to the respective regional conditions. ALTANA staged
the Management Challenge for the first time in the fall
of 2016 in Hong Kong with 26 applicants for the DP Asia,
which will begin in 2017.
Dialog for Assessing Performance
To promote employees’ professional development, ALTANA
regularly implements specially developed dialogs with all
employees.
They include a progress dialog, which the disciplinary
superiors carry out at least once a year with each
staff member. The progress dialog serves to assess the development
of the employees and paves the way for agreeing
on targets with the employees.
If a work contract specifies that the target agreements
impact the compensation of the employee in question,
the objective-setting dialog is supplemented by a performance
dialog. The superiors carry out the latter dialog with the
employees at least once a year as well. The three dialog elements
together constitute the ALTANA Compass Dialog.
Women in Leadership Positions
With its Keep Changing Agenda, ALTANA has also set itself
the goal of increasing the number of women in leadership
positions. We aim to achieve a total percentage of
30 % by 2025. In Germany, the share of women in leadership
positions
was 21.5 % in 2016. Owing to different
hierarchical and contractual structures, ALTANA
has not determined
the ratio of women in companies outside
of
Germany.
90 Human Resources