Employees

Employees

• Diversity has high priority at Evonik: first group inclusion officer appointed
• New global positioning as an employer
• Greater integration of sustainability into core HR processes (Next Generation Culture)

Qualified and motivated employees are vital for Evonik’s longterm success. Our HR strategy therefore focuses on three aspects:

• Attracting qualified and talented people in the market
• developing them
• and retaining them in the company in the long term

This is based on extensive human resources and requirements planning in close consultation with our organizational units and a targeted recruitment policy, especially for key positions. At the same time, we empower all employees to actively shape and pursue their own career paths within the company. This is supplemented by competitive remuneration and benefits. Being a highly attractive employer with a correspondingly high level of employee engagement is still of central significance for Evonik.

Attractiveness as an employer

In order to attract employees and strengthen employee retention, Evonik revised its positioning as an employer in 2023. Our new employer identity, “Be Part of Something Special”, covers three key aspects: the importance of products and solutions for a sustainable future, the potential for individual development, and the strong team spirit within the workforce. Evonik offers an appreciative and motivational working environment with performance-related remuneration and additional benefits, flexible worktime models, a focus on occupational health and safety, and transparent development opportunities that supports digital competencies, diversity, and work-life balance.

Talent management

We regularly assess and evaluate potential, succession scenarios, and the development requirements of talented employees at HR meetings attended by the executive board. Special attention is paid to attractive career paths, job rotation, and high-quality development programs to support the development of our future top executives.

Corporate culture

The world of work is undergoing profound changes—from digitalization and new ways of working to the responsible use of natural and social resources. To complement Next Generation Technologies and Next Generation Solutions, Evonik has adopted Next Generation Culture with the aim of integrating sustainability requirements at all stages in the HR process.

Dealing with the shortage of skilled workers

The intensifying shortage of skilled workers requires us to step up our activities to retain and develop our employees and recruit qualified new employees while they are training or studying. We support the retention of skilled staff through a culture that strengthens performance, loyalty, and identification with the company throughout their employment with Evonik.

Attractiveness as an employer: progress in 2023

Evonik, as an employer, has adopted a new global positioning approach to address the employment market. Based on an analysis of the recruitment market and the support of many employees around the world, we developed a new slogan: “Be Part of Something Special.” Working closely with our organizational units, our three topics—Impact, Potential, Culture—support sustainability.

Our new identity as an employer was presented worldwide. Together with Employer Branding, our business entities and regions are integrating their key messages into their strategies and using them digitally to address potential employees.

Our most important advocacy platforms are the People Stories on our careers site, featuring employees and their stories, and temporary takeovers of the Evonik Instagram channel. Our aim is to gain the right people for key positions and strengthen the loyalty of present employees. Alongside themed pages aimed at specific target groups, employees give insights into their daily work on the new “Be Part of Something Special” social wall.

Together with our Research & Development and Engineering departments, Employer Branding is stepping up its partnerships with selected German universities. In North America, employee ambassadors and members of employee resource groups assist us with our university relations strategy, which we use to address talented people at target universities. In China, we work closely with reputable universities to enhance our attractiveness as an employer. Our established trainee programs offer an optimum starting point for highly qualified employees.

We benefit from our long-standing partnerships with student networks such as UNITECH, a network that brings together international universities, global corporations, and engineering students, and FEMTEC, which focuses on fostering young female employees and talents in STEM professions (science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and IT). To attract candidates with professional experience, we collaborate with alumni organizations. These partnerships play a part in our diversity strategy by specifically addressing the recruitment of women and international staff.

In Germany, our employer branding campaign aimed at young people seeking an apprenticeship won first place in the Digital Communication Awards. In China, the Top Employer Institute presented us with the Top Employer accolade for the 16th time. In Germany, Evonik was ranked as a Leading Employer for the sixth time in succession.

Employee satisfaction

Employee satisfaction is a central success factor for Evonik. Alongside competitive remuneration and attractive development opportunities, our employees benefit from a wide range of offerings to improve their work-life balance as well as preventive health care.

Attractive remuneration

Attractive, market- and performance-oriented remuneration is anchored in our human resources tools worldwide. The principles we use to structure remuneration, including fringe benefits, are set out in group-wide policies. Remuneration is set on the basis of objective criteria such as responsibility, competencies, and success. Personal attributes such as gender, age, etc., play no part in the process, and our policies explicitly forbid discrimination

Work-life balance

A family-friendly HR policy that is geared to different phases in people’s lives is important to Evonik. More than 96 percent of our employees around the world have access to related initiatives. At the heart of this approach are flexible worktime models, support for people caring for close relatives, and assistance with childcare. The PAIRfect initiative offers a job sharing platform to help our employees structure their work time more flexibly by bringing them together with colleagues who want to share a job.

Well@Work

Alongside work-life balance, the focal areas of our in-house Well@Work initiative are exercise, nutrition, and mental fitness. A wide range of offerings at our sites, supplemented by groupwide digital programs, foster the physical and mental health of our employees.

#SmartWork

#SmartWork is our approach to hybrid working, comprising a balanced mixture of presence in the workplace and mobile working.

Diversity and equal opportunity

As an international company with a presence in wide-ranging markets, we see diversity as an opportunity. Diversity is not simply a social or political obligation. We see it as a key to business success. Employees with different backgrounds and personalities enrich our teams and our company.

We do not tolerate discrimination. Diversity enhances Evonik’s creativity, innovative capability, and proximity to customers. It also has a positive influence on the recruitment of new employees and on staff retention. We actively raise awareness of this issue through our corporate media and regular dialogue formats. We use training in diversity and unconscious bias for employees in a wide range of jobs and levels in the company to raise awareness of diversity and unconscious bias and of factors that hinder diversity.

Vocational training and continuing professional development

Evonik regards well-trained employees as a success factor in competition and has a global learning strategy aligned with future business requirements. Our activities in this area cover both the vocational training of young people at the start of their working lives and continuing professional development of our employees.

In 2023, Evonik trained more than 1,660 young people. Our offering covered 36 recognized vocational training courses and combined vocational training and study programs at 15 sites. The tables in the vocational training data report 2023 in the internet are from 2021. Apprentices accounted for 6 percent of our workforce in Germany, and therefore remained above the national average of around 4.7 percent in Germany.

Chapters in the sustainability report

• Employees
• Strategy and Management
• Attractiveness as an employer
• Strategy and Management
• Employee satisfaction
• Strategy and Management
• Diversity and equal opportunity
• Strategy and Management
• Vocational training and continuing professional development
• Our targets

Our targets

Below is an overview of the targets set for our employees area of action.

Target attainment in 2023
	Proportion of women in top and senior management should be 23 percent at each level by 2023 (status 2023: 22.2 percent and 18.5 percent)
	Intercultural mix at executive level should be 20 percent by 2023 (status 2023: 18.4 percent)

Targets for 2024 and beyond
	Proportion of women in top and senior management should be 30 percent at each level by 2026
	Intercultural mix at executive level should be 25 percent by 2026
	Average digital, self-directed learning using the LILY and LinkedIn Learning platforms should be more than 3 hours per employee per year by 2026