Attracting, enabling & engaging a diverse workforce

Attracting & developing talent

As a young and dynamic business operating in a competitive industry, it is essential to prioritize the attraction and retention of top talent. By creating a unique and distinct business culture led by recognized leaders in the chemicals industry, we can offer our employees the opportunity to shape and grow with the company. This makes us an attractive employer for new hires and emphasizes the importance of engaging with and developing our current team members. By valuing our workforce and providing meaningful work, we are building a strong and sustainable business.

For our new hires and established workforce, we have both employee training and individual employee development plans. On an annual basis, all staff is required to complete compliance training that includes instruction on our Code of Conduct. Additionally, all employees have access to LinkedIn Learning to develop specific skills based on their jobs and interests.

Our talent attraction efforts in 2022 were primarily led by individual sites and regions. This included regional partnerships with organizations focusing on women in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) and early careers apprenticeship programs. In 2023, we will focus on ensuring that our talent attraction processes are designed to include diverse slate hiring pools and target specific communities in line with our goal to build a workforce that is more diverse in gender, race, background and skillsets.

Diversity, equity & inclusion

Having a more diverse, equitable and inclusive workforce is a critical component of our global employee strategy. Diversity is important for better decision-making, higher quality ideas and innovation. We are committed to creating a workplace where all employees can bring their full selves to work every day, participate authentically and are valued for their unique talents and perspectives.

As a global company with a global customer base, we understand that diversity looks different in every part of the world, and we want our business to be reflective of all the markets in which we operate. We recognize that the chemicals industry has historically had a skewed gender ratio, and we are committed to playing a role in promoting greater diversity within the industry. One way we are working towards this goal is by setting a target for our leadership team to achieve 40% female representation by 2030. This year, female representation in our senior leadership team was 23%.^[1]

To demonstrate our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) at the leadership level, in 2022 we began actively communicating our diversity statistics and measures to our Executive Leadership Team (ELT). While DEI is sponsored at the executive level by our Chief People Officer, Sandra Collier, our CEO Marc Doyle is actively involved in and passionate about driving forward awareness and progress of this important work. Equally, DEI is being championed at the operational level by a group of passionate employees who established a DEI steering committee in 2022, aiming to foster a diverse, equitable and inclusive culture at Arxada.

To attract top talent, we are developing a talent engine roadmap with specific workstreams focused on aligning job levels and performance measures globally, standardizing our approach to early careers, and creating a plan for employee learning and development that includes training for line managers. Our talent engine roadmap will link to our DEI ambitions, creating a more diverse talent pipeline. This will include targeted partnerships and job descriptions containing gender-neutral and inclusive language. By implementing these strategies, we strengthen our position as an attractive and supportive employer for top talent.

While DEI representation and commitment at the leadership level is important, we are working on creating a more diverse talent pipeline for all career levels by ingraining DEI into our talent attraction processes.

Arxada workforce diversity 2022

Engaging employees

Employee engagement is the key to retention, and our fast-evolving business makes it important to listen to our employees while providing them with a strong understanding of our purpose and values. To do so, we are providing our employees with regional guidance and are engaging them through awards and a specialized engagement survey.

All employees have access to an employee handbook that contains guidelines on policies and practices that are specifically applicable to their region. The handbook helps employees better understand their job expectations, as well as Arxada and the company culture. It contains practical information on employee benefits, and outlines how misconduct, such as harassment and discrimination, is handled. Our employee handbooks reflect our company values and reinforces our Code of Conduct. Learn more about our Code of Conduct, values and approach to business ethics.

To ensure we are effectively promoting areas such as diversity and inclusion, and health and wellbeing within our organization, we value and rely on feedback from our employees. To gather this feedback, we use Peakon, the employee engagement platform for our Insights2Action survey. This initiative is deployed across our organization to measure our drivers of employee engagement including role rewards, recognition, workload and other items that contribute to an overall engagement score. We work with local teams to develop and agree on action plans to improve their scores and engage employees more effectively.

The survey also provides an employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS). The eNPS tells us how likely our employees are to recommend Arxada as a place to work to family and friends, thus providing an additional measure of employee engagement and satisfaction. In 2022, our eNPS was 7.2 and we aim to achieve a score of 7.5 by 2024. We will work to improve our engagement with eNPS by providing enhanced training for line managers to enable them to have more meaningful development conversations and offer better support for their teams.

Insight2Action survey results are shared at the individual team level. Both the team results, as well as global results, help us identify areas across the business that need more support and attention in 2023.

Arxada’s 2022 Insight2Action scores

Looking forward to 2023

In 2023, we will expand and grow our DEI efforts. The DEI steering team will work to build a more comprehensive strategy to drive progress toward our goals and build a foundation for nurturing a culture of inclusion and belonging. Our DEI efforts will be further supported by the launch of our employee resource groups (ERGs). Through our ERGs, we will aim to hear the authentic voices of our employees and understand their motivations and needs. This input will help us build the supporting policies, frameworks and practices required to reach our targets and goals, and create a true culture of belonging. We aspire to maintain this continuous feedback loop to ensure our employees feel heard and included.