Our people

We strive to create a strong and supportive culture where our people feel empowered to dream big, go beyond and make the impossible possible.

Fostering a winning team is one of the three main business goals in our Corporate Compass. To support this goal, we strive to create an inclusive culture and embrace diversity, invest in training and development to help employees achieve their goals and build their careers with SIG, listen and respond to our people, recognise and reward the work they do, and create a positive working environment.

These commitments help us recruit and retain the best people, maintain strong levels of job satisfaction, motivation, engagement and productivity, support our diverse customers, foster innovation, develop the skills we need to support our business now and in the future, and meet growing expectations from investors and other stakeholders on these issues.

Our commitment

We employed approximately 8,700 employees in 2022, including nearly 2,500 joining us through acquisitions part way through the year.

We are committed to providing an inclusive working environment where everyone can bring their true selves to work. We do not tolerate discrimination based on race, religion, national origin, political affiliation, gender, sexual orientation, disability, age or any other relevant category. Improving gender balance, particularly at senior levels of the business, is a priority and we aim to do so through enhanced efforts to attract and develop female employees and leaders.

We strive to provide opportunities for career development and to lead the industry in our investment in training and development. We continually work to improve the frequency and quality of feedback and appraisal sessions to support employee engagement, development and performance.

We are committed to creating an open, engaging and energising work environment where our people feel that their ideas, needs and concerns are heard and valued, they are recognised and rewarded for what they do, and they understand how their work contributes to the success of the business. Positive working conditions are reinforced by ensuring fair pay, working hours and days off, providing job security and offering competitive benefits in each local market.

Our commitment to uphold fair labour practices is part of our wider commitment on human rights (see Responsible culture: human rights).

Our targets

Our progress

Women now represent a third of our Group Executive Board and 23%¹ of our leaders worldwide, and we continued efforts to recruit and develop women across our business. We extended our range of learning and development programmes, and introduced a mobility policy to encourage opportunities for international assignments. In our latest employee survey, engagement levels remained strong and we continued to outperform the industry benchmark in half the categories, even during a period of change in the business with two major acquisitions in 2022. Engaging employees on our plans and welcoming new colleagues joining us through acquisitions were important areas of focus this year.

Accelerating development for women at SIG

The first cohort of 15 female SIG employees completed our new Women Acceleration Programme this year and the next cohort has begun. The programme offers virtual learning, coaching and mentoring, as well as project challenges over nine months. Feedback has been very positive.

“Being part of this amazing programme has helped me gain confidence in my own set of skills that make me unique as a professional woman. I have learned effective new techniques to analyse challenges and overcome obstacles, and expanded my support network to help me find better solutions to complex challenges. The programme has given me the opportunity to get to know myself better and develop my own leadership style to become a better leader, a better colleague and a better version of me.”

Performance in 2022²

Diversity, equity and inclusion

• In 2022, we welcomed another two women to the Group Executive Board (GEB) – Angela Lu, President & General Manager Asia Pacific South, and Suzanne Verzijden, Chief People & Culture Officer. Women now make up 33% (three of nine members) of the GEB and 33% (three of nine members) of our Board of Directors.
• Women represented 23% of our leaders in 2022, up from 20% last year, and we remain on track with our roadmap to achieve our target to increase women in leadership to 30% by 2025. Fifteen female leaders completed our new Women Acceleration Programme and a second cohort began the programme in December 2022 (see case study above).
• We worked to enhance gender diversity in our Middle East and Africa business, fully owned by SIG since 2020. We have appointed our first female function leader in the region, the new head of Human Resources, who is also the first woman in our Middle East and Africa management team. Women also joined our business in Saudi Arabia for the first time this year, with four new female employees at our Riyadh site, and we welcomed our first female employee in Nigeria as Head of Sales in our Lagos sales office.
• In line with our global approach, we promoted diversity and inclusion from the beginning of the recruitment process for our new plant in Mexico this year. We featured images of women in job postings and social media, included female candidates in shortlists regardless of position, trained recruitment teams on unconscious bias, and offered suitable benefits and facilities to attract and retain women. We also refreshed our collaboration with RWTH Aachen University in Germany to encourage female engineering students to consider careers at SIG.
• We celebrated International Women’s Day with a series of initiatives on the 2022 theme #BreakThe Bias, including an informal virtual coffee meeting for SIG women to connect with colleagues across the organisation, as well as local talks and celebrations.
• We completed the rollout of mandatory training on unconscious bias and inclusion to all SIG leaders, and in 2023 we will extend this to leaders who have joined us through acquisitions this year.
• We have begun to look at diversity beyond gender, starting with a virtual fireside chat on LGBTQIA+ with an external expert who shared personal experiences and thoughts on how SIG can become a more inclusive workplace and create a safe environment for all employees to bring their whole selves to work.
• We achieved a score of 83%³ for diversity, equity and inclusion in our 2022 employee survey, six points above the industry benchmark.⁴

Women in management (%)

Talent development

• We continued to offer coaching opportunities and launched a global mentoring programme, open to all employees, in January 2022. By the end of the year, 58 mentors and 54 mentees were actively participating.
• The first cohort of 75 participants embarked on our Transformational Leaders training, with cross-functional workshops and face-to-face workshops with leaders and direct teams. Separately, 16 employees are participating in our Operations Leaders Development programme as the second cohort for this programme. We plan to extend both programmes in 2023. We also piloted a four-month programme that provided coaching and workshops on leadership and management for 12 new leaders, or people who will soon be leaders.
• We launched a six-month pilot for on-demand training through the Bookboon e-library, with more than 1,000 employees using the service to access nearly 8,400 units of content by the end of the year. We also continued to offer access to Speex for language learning, used by employees to complete around 1,400 hours of training.
• Overall, we provided an average of 20.9 hours of training per employee in 2022, up slightly from 20.5 hours last year but still falling short of the pre-pandemic industry benchmark of 24.0 hours. We provided an average of 21.0 hours per employee for men and 20.6 hours per employee for women.
• We have introduced a new global mobility policy, with central coordination of long-term international assignments to create a more consistent approach across the business. We are also offering opportunities to enhance cross-functional experiences through short-term assignments on specific projects. For example, we offered international assignments to Mexico in 2022 to prepare for and support operations at our new aseptic carton production plant in Querétaro.
• We have discontinued our target on development plans for key talent and instead we will focus on wider talent development for employees across the business following on from the training and guidance we introduced for managers and employees last year on setting effective development plans. In 2022, 57% of employees received regular performance and career development reviews.
• Feedback from employees⁵ participating in our survey this year showed we are four points above the industry benchmark⁶ for learning and development opportunities.

Average hours of training (per employee)

Employee satisfaction

• Globally, 78% of our employees – including those joining through acquisitions part way through the year – participated in our biennial employee survey in 2022. Despite the survey taking place during a period of significant change in the business, shortly after two major acquisitions, our overall engagement score remained strong at 83%⁵, just one point below the industry benchmark.⁶
• Overall, we significantly outperformed industry benchmarks in six of the 11 categories, most notably on corporate responsibility, equal opportunities and inclusion, learning and development (particularly career advancement opportunities), fairness of pay and retention. We also identified room for improvement, where we scored below the industry benchmark, in relation to empowerment, non-monetary recognition and survey follow-up. We have a clear roadmap in place for our leaders and employees to discuss survey results at global and local level, define and implement actions, and communicate progress on an ongoing basis to demonstrate more clearly how we are responding to feedback from the survey. This includes engagement plan workshops for managers to address specific local feedback with their teams.
• 60%⁷ of employees felt that significant actions have been taken to address priorities identified through the previous employee survey, compared with 61% in 2020. This year, we continued to look for ways to further improve on priority areas identified in the previous employee survey, including:
  • Making more use of non-monetary recognition: Top teams and leaders from across SIG were recognised through our global SIG Shine awards, presented by SIG CEO Samuel Sigrist at our townhall meeting in March 2022. We introduced non-monetary recognition programmes in our Middle East and Africa region for the first time this year. Other local and regional programmes to recognise employee contributions to the Company’s success included regular recognition at group meetings and quarterly awards of a special performance bonus in China, everyday appreciation cards in Thailand, Stars Awards in our Asia Pacific region, Believe in + Recognition awards in North America, personal thank you posters drawn by our plant manager in Linnich (Germany) and thanks to colleagues celebrating milestone anniversaries at SIG. 58%⁸ of employees participating in our latest biennial survey in 2022 felt that SIG makes adequate use of recognition and rewards other than money to encourage good performance, six points below the industry benchmark.⁹
  • Communicating long-term goals better: We communicated our business strategy and engaged employees on our goals and other topics through quarterly townhall meetings, a roundtable with members of the GEB, extended leadership team meetings and local communications. The integration of newly acquired businesses was a key focus of our dialogue with employees this year (see below). In South America, all SIG managers took part in a communicative leadership programme to support them in engaging their teams through clear communication.
  • Clarifying possible career paths: We continued to expand our range of training and development programmes, including introducing a new mentoring programme and mobility policy. We have discontinued our target for key talent to have development plans in place to focus on wider development opportunities for employees across the business.
  • Improving physical working conditions at some sites: Following on from work to improve ventilation and temperature control at our plant in Linnich (Germany) last year, we are now investing in similar improvements at our plant in Neuhausen (Switzerland).
• We introduced a hybrid working model for office workers, with an average of three days in the office and two days with employees working wherever they feel they work best, depending on their roles. This flexibility is designed to help employees meet the demands of work and home in the most productive and healthy way, while encouraging impactful collaboration and meaningful connections with colleagues and customers. A toolkit for leaders helps them with decisions on when and how to manage teams who are not in the office and provides ideas to foster a positive in-office environment. We also launched a new global programme to support employee wellbeing (see Responsible culture: health, safety and wellbeing).
• We continued to review pay and benefits to ensure they remain competitive within each local market, including in light of rising inflation rates.
• We received external recognition for our efforts on employee satisfaction this year. We achieved Great Place to Work™ certification – the global benchmark for outstanding employee experience based on surveys of employees – in South America for the second time and in North America for the first time (for both Mexico and the USA). Our Rayong plant received the 2022 Excellent Practices Establishment on Labour Relations and Welfare National Level as the 2^nd Year of Achievement award from the Thai Ministry of Labour (see Responsible culture: human rights). SIG Combibloc China was honoured with the title of Greater Suzhou Best Employer for the second year running in an assessment that included both employee perception and expert evaluation
• Our voluntary turnover rate was 6.6% in 2022.

Biennial employee survey results

Managing change

• We completed two major acquisitions in 2022. We communicated regularly with existing SIG employees and colleagues joining us from Scholle IPN and Evergreen Asia to set out our strategy and keep them updated on our plans and next steps, both prior to the acquisitions and as we begin to integrate the newly acquired businesses into SIG policies and processes. We held a series of events to welcome the approximately 2,100 employees joining from Scholle IPN and 385 from Evergreen Asia, and feedback was very positive.
• In June 2022, when the acquisition of Scholle IPN completed, we held a series of Day One events around the world to celebrate. The events kicked off with a joint video message from SIG CEO Samuel Sigrist and Scholle IPN President Ross Bushnell setting out our Better Together approach. During the events, SIG leaders were on site at various Scholle IPN locations to engage with new colleagues face to face and answer their questions.
• When the acquisition of Evergreen Asia’s chilled carton business completed in August 2022, we held a series of townhall meetings to welcome new colleagues and introduce SIG’s business strategy. These were followed up with team meetings and sessions with SIG representatives and the general managers of the three former Evergreen plants in China, South Korea and Taiwan to enable employees to ask questions.
• 79%¹⁰ of employees participating in our 2022 survey – including those joining us from Scholle IPN and Evergreen – said SIG does a good job of keeping them informed about matters that affect them (two points above the industry benchmark¹¹).

Our workforce¹

New hires¹

Employee turnover¹

Governance bodies by age group

1 Includes employees joining SIG from Evergreen Asia.

2 Except where otherwise noted, all employee performance data includes employees joining SIG in 2022 through the acquisition of Evergreen Asia, but excludes those joining through the acquisition of Scholle IPN.

3 Includes employees joining SIG in 2022 through the acquisitions of Scholle IPN and Evergreen Asia.

4 Industry benchmark defined as norms for manufacturing companies participating in the Willis Towers Watson employee engagement survey.

5 Includes employees joining SIG from Scholle IPN and Evergreen Asia.

6 Industry benchmark defined as norms for manufacturing companies participating in the Willis Towers Watson employee engagement survey.

7 Excludes employees from parts of the business that were not included in our previous survey: the Middle East and Africa region, which SIG took full ownership of in 2021, and the businesses acquired from Scholle IPN and Evergreen Asia in 2022.

8 Includes employees joining SIG from Scholle IPN and Evergreen Asia.

9 Industry benchmark defined as norms for manufacturing companies participating in the Willis Towers Watson employee engagement survey.

10 Includes employees joining SIG from Scholle IPN and Evergreen Asia.

11 Industry benchmark defined as norms for manufacturing companies participating in the Willis Towers Watson employee engagement survey.