Our team
The best place to turn your dreams into reality
We aim to create an environment where all of our approximately 9,000 employees worldwide feel free to believe in more by helping our Company to explore new paths and create what’s next. We believe that by fostering an inclusive culture, supporting fair and equal opportunities for everyone and creating a working environment free of biases, we enable our employees to develop their full potential and to feel recognised and rewarded.
Talent development
Our Company offers a wide range of positions, which are as individual as our people. We aim to match the skills of each employee to the opportunities within the Company and to continuously improve the way we address employee needs. We undertake to give every employee the chance to take part in internal or external training programmes, coaching and mentoring, plus on-the-job learning experiences. All upskilling and development requirements are identified as part of the review and feedback process throughout the year. We identify talents that we need to foster as well as gaps in our succession pipeline that we need to fill. The idea of our talent and succession management is to establish frameworks, processes, tools and skills to systematically and effectively identify, manage, actively develop and retain employees with high performance and potential. We adapt our talent advancement approach to certain career paths in order to prepare our talents for success in their targeted future role.
Our leadership programmes provide intensive training in the SIG Leadership Model so that transformational leadership becomes our common leadership philosophy – inspiring and empowering others to continuously learn, innovate and grow.
Employee satisfaction
By creating an engaging and energising working environment, we aim to enable our employees to realise their full potential and to improve their workplace experience. By listening to them and responding to their views, we help to sustain high levels of job satisfaction.
To further foster engagement, we give our employees a voice in our biennial Employee Engagement Survey and in the implementation of concrete improvement measures in their area of responsibility, scope of influence and direct working and team environment. We also engage employees in the business through virtual town hall meetings and smaller group sessions with SIG C-level executives. Our employee value proposition, “Believe in More”, encourages our employees to create what’s next, inspire real change and make a positive impact. As a result, our sustainable engagement score was very close to the industry benchmark in the 2022 survey.
To ensure that our employees feel motivated and energised at work, we are implementing measures that support a healthy work–life balance. We offer employee benefits reflecting the regional, legal and cultural context. These include retirement benefits, health and life insurance, flexible work arrangements (eg. part-time positions, working from home where possible) and parental benefits and leave. We remunerate employees in line with existing market practices. We benchmark our compensation approach against other companies to ensure that our compensation packages are competitive in each of our markets. The Company ensures that performance is recognised and rewarded in a fair and transparent manner.
We have received external recognition for our efforts on employee satisfaction, achieving Great Place to Work™ certification – the global benchmark for outstanding employee experience based on employee surveys – in South America for the second time and in North America for the first time.
Employment and labour rights
The SIG Code of Conduct addresses ethical and legal principles in general, whilst the SIG Business Ethics Code sets out more specific principles regarding employment and labour rights. Employees are encouraged to report any violation of the principles through the SIG Ethics & Compliance Hotline or any other available channel. As part of our Sedex (Supplier Ethical Data Exchange) membership, all our production sites undergo SMETA (Sedex Members Ethical Trade Audit) four-pillar audits every two years. Moreover, our global policies and performance are assessed by EcoVadis.
We have continued to review and strengthen our human rights due diligence by assessing our operations and supply chain against upcoming regulatory requirements.
Diversity, equity and inclusion
We believe that by fostering a more inclusive culture, empowering people with different abilities and supporting equal opportunities, we can add value to our business, improve the lives of our employees and make a significant contribution to society. We have established a diversity, equity and inclusion strategy with an overarching vision and set targets to improve our gender equality. One of our main priorities is to improve gender balance in our traditionally male-dominated industry by attracting and developing more women, particularly in leadership roles. We are doing this by collaborating with universities to attract female engineers, engaging women and minorities better in our recruitment processes, and defining requirements in our career development processes to help us select the best candidates from a diverse pool of internal and external applicants. In addition, we are creating a working environment that strengthens our ability to attract and retain women, eg. by offering more flexible working options where feasible.
Our leaders have been trained to recognise their unconscious biases and to create relevant conditions to foster diversity and inclusion by actively driving change. The Company is fully committed to preventing discrimination on any grounds, and we have publicly committed to promoting diversity throughout our organisation as a signatory of the German Diversity Charter (Charta der Vielfalt).
In our last Employee Engagement Survey, the vast majority of respondents agreed that the Company is perceived as an open-minded organisation with a broad diversity of employees.