Challenges Mastered Together in 2021
Of overriding importance for ALTANA’s corporate success are
its highly qualified, motivated, and dedicated employees.
They are our most important resource. So during the coronavirus
pandemic it was all the more important to continue
to ensure the health and performance of each individual in
the second year of the pandemic. While many colleagues
worked primarily from home, the teams in the laboratories,
production, and logistics ensured on-site operations.
Between Pandemic and New Normal
Even though the pandemic continued, in 2021 ALTANA was
already intensively engaged in designing a new normality
consisting of on-site and mobile work after the pandemic. The
company sees the New Normal above all as an opportu-
nity to expand its position as a future-oriented, modern employer.
Our corporate culture, with its values of appreciation,
openness, empowerment to act, and trust, contributes
to this. To do justice to the complexity of the issue, the
company’s worldwide management was called upon to develop
sustainable concepts in line with local conditions, as the
respective legal, site-specific, and activity-related framework
conditions can vary widely. This culture of hybrid work will
continue to accompany us in the coming years and will have
to be regularly adapted to current internal and external circumstances.
HR Transformation
We are also aligning our HR processes with a view to the future.
As part of the HR Transformation project launched in
2018, we successfully completed the first key project phase
in the spring of 2021. As a result, all HR master data have
been brought together in a leading HR management system
(SAP SuccessFactors). This enables ALTANA to simplify reporting,
for example, and to involve the entire workforce in
our HR processes – an important foundation for the project’s
overall objective of rethinking overarching HR processes,
improving established processes, and connecting the HR
community more closely.
Furthermore, in the course of the global rollout of SuccessFactors,
the interface for transferring employee data to
IT was significantly improved. Consequently, data maintenance
can be simplified, multiple maintenance avoided, and
significantly higher data quality achieved.
For the penetration of processes, it is of utmost impor-
tance that all employees have the equal opportunity to use
digital media. For this reason, we also provided IT access to
people who do not need a personalized user account for their
daily work. Around 480 additional user accounts were gen-
erated and made available to colleagues.
The implementation of a global learning platform, which
had been driven forward in the previous year, was successfully
completed in 2021. In the year under review, we made
global e-learning available to our workforce on the learning
platform and assigned target group-specific training courses
to employees.
Talent Management
We reached another important milestone by implementing a
global, system-supported Talent Cycle. The realignment
of our annual employee appraisal based on the competency
model adapted in 2019 is an important building block for
ALTANA-wide talent management.
The Talent Cycle enables all colleagues equally to receive
transparent feedback on the competencies that are impor-
tant to ALTANA, so that everyone’s personal strengths and
fields of development can be clearly identified. In this way,
100 Human Resources