It has long been acknowledged that diversity and inclusion can significantly enhance your employer brand amongst all stakeholders, adding real value and delivering results that are conducive to a richer, more positive workplace culture. Of course, as an employer, cultivating a sense of belonging for everyone in your company is also key to hiring and retaining top talent.
With this in mind, it is easy to understand why, as topics, diversity and inclusion remain top of mind across business sectors, emerging as strategic priorities for talent management professionals all over the world.
Today, Ferrero has over 37,000 employees based in more than 50 countries. We know that, to succeed as a group, we must engage all our people to continue to succeed. In fact, ‘Empower People’ is one of our four key pillars, which fall under our sustainability framework.
In the context of diversity and inclusion, empowering our people means listening and responding to their views and creating a working environment where people feel valued and safe. For over 70 years, we have believed that a diverse and inclusive workforce and culture of strong values are crucial to long-term business success.
Supporting workforce
From our very founding, Ferrero’s culture has been rooted in values such as respect and integrity. Our focus on people extends across the whole value chain, ensuring we uphold high standards of safety, human and labour rights in both our operations and global supply chain.
When it comes to capabilities, we believe that all our people are equally talented in their own way. In nurturing their curiosity and natural abilities, we provide the means to succeed personally and professionally throughout their journey with the group. Today, our GCC inclusion and diversity programme focusses on the three dimensions of gender, generations and working culture.
Taking action
Needless to say, diversity and inclusion efforts simply can’t bear fruit overnight. At Ferrero, we understand that building a truly inclusive environment takes time and requires the development of processes and guidelines to support the change.
That is precisely why, in financial year 2019/2020, we started the deployment of a three-year plan including a full set of initiatives addressing aspects such as recruitment, succession planning, learning, flexible working and reward.
As part of that plan, we took a number of actions. For example, we appointed the company’s first global diversity and inclusion manager.
We also designed and communicated a global governance model, including a group council and several regional councils to drive the global and local diversity and inclusion agenda, respectively.
In addition, a total of 17 regional diversity and inclusion ambassadors were nominated to work as a network on diversity and inclusion programmes. They are responsible for driving the regional diversity and inclusion agenda, reinforcing the subject regionally and elevating local voices by adapting the group’s vision in accordance with specific needs.
For tracking purposes, we also created a global diversity and inclusion dashboard to be rolled out to all regions, designed to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs).
Looking ahead, we will continue to evolve our strategy focussing on creating an inclusive mindset. Our aim is to preserve and protect the unique and distinctive know-how, experience and expertise we have built up throughout our long heritage while developing new skills and capabilities through lifelong learning.
For us, this is key because we understand that having a strong diversity and inclusion strategy isn’t simply about attracting talent.
For individuals to bring their best selves to work and reach their full potential, they need to feel like they are part of a culture that they truly belong to.