Our Employees: Our Most Important Asset
ALTANA is a highly innovative globally leading specialty
chemicals company. Of overriding importance for the company’s
success is our most important resource, our employees,
who are motivated and dedicated and have above-average
qualifications. They are committed to the respectful
corporate culture defined in ALTANA’s Guiding Principles,
which is informed by our four central values: appreciation,
openness, empowerment to act, and trust. As an attractive
employer, we offer our some 6,500 employees around the
world individualized further training opportunities and promote
their professional development in a targeted manner.
In order to do justice to advancing digitalization, in the year
under review we included further education and training
measures in the ALTANA further education and training catalog
that train employees in new digital applications. In
addition, in the course of the HR transformation project and
the associated introduction of the human resource management
tool SuccessFactors, employees can increasingly control
their own profile digitally on their own responsibility
and independently.
Human Resource Development and Talent
Management
To ensure that the company remains highly competitive in
globalized sales markets, a primary focus of the ALTANA
Group’s human resource strategy is to secure young talent.
Special emphasis is placed on consistent and global pro-
motion of internal talent. We consider the continuous optimization
of human resource development programs, close
monitoring of talent, and the identification of development
measures and perspectives to be key factors in this regard.
To make human resource development at ALTANA more transparent,
we developed the so-called Talent Cycle in the
2019 reporting year. This annually recurring process includes
identification and selection of talent for internal succes-
sions, as well as the selection of participants for development
programs. The focus is on the progress dialogue, which
was revised in 2019. It includes a comprehensive development
plan, as well as an assessment of each employee’s skills by
a manager and feedback from the employee to the manager.
Employees and managers are encouraged to exchange in-
formation at eye level and jointly define the employee’s development
path in open dialogue. Constructive feedback and
support are the top priorities. The basis for the new progress
dialogue, the global introduction of which will be complet-
ed by the beginning of 2021, is the competence model that
was already introduced in 2018. In order to focus on the
internal exchange and global networking of our managers, we
support our employees’ development through internal personnel
development programs. In the 2019 reporting year,
one of our international Management Development Programs
and a regional development program in Europe were
successfully completed. Most of the participating manag-
ers took on more responsibility during or after the programs,
either globally or cross-divisionally. This illustrates the success
of the programs as an important component of talent
management. In the year under review, programs for Europe
and the Americas were launched. The Advanced Leader-
ship Program (ALP), first launched in 2018, was completed
at the beginning of this year (2020).
Women in Leadership Positions
Diversity in leadership positions is an important goal of our
Keep Changing Agenda. At the end of 2019, 29.8 percent of
our employees in Germany and 21.9 percent of our managers
there were women. ALTANA’s medium- to long-term goal
is to increase the share of women in leadership positions to
the percentage of women in the company’s total workforce.
94 Human Resources