Care and Perform
At a Glance
Successes and Actions
- Continuous increase in employee engagement: all-time high in GEOS employee survey
- Introduction of “MOMENT” people approach reinforces priority on personal and professional growth
- Virtual delivery of “Care and Perform during challenging times” workshop for all employees
SUSTAINABLE CULTURE AND EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
Employee engagement as focus of our strategy
Our company founder Martin Hilti was already convinced of the importance of an employee-oriented corporate culture as the foundation for a successful business model. Even today – 80 years later – engagement is at the heart of our efforts. Because enthusiasm and professionalism are transferred to our customers with highly motivated employees, which ultimately produces increasingly better results.
Our culture is decisive for establishing a spirit of collaboration at Hilti: We support and challenge each other, and we measure ourselves against the results of our work. As part of our “Care & Perform” culture, which is constantly evolving and based on our core values of commitment, courage, teamwork and integrity, we also support sustainability in all employee-related topics: inclusion and diversity, employee development, mental and physical health as well as work-life-balance.
I consider it management’s most important task and an entrepreneur’s ethical responsibility to create a company climate in which every single person develops the will to succeed and commit, while still having fun at work.
Martin Hilti,
Company Founder
Our goal is to enable the engagement of our employees.
A high-performing global team is one of the cornerstones of our corporate strategy. In recent years, our team has grown strongly, become more global and diverse. We have increased the number of our employees by approximately 50 percent since 2010. About 30,000 people around the world currently work for Hilti. With their dedication and engagement, they decide every day whether and how we get better as a group. At this point in time, approximately 60 percent of our team members belong to the generation of the “millennials”. We want to meet the different expectations of both our younger and older employees equally as well as those from different cultural backgrounds.
Employees by region 2020
New employees by region
Employees by age structure 2020
The Group-wide people strategy is based on our caring and performance-oriented corporate culture. Overarching goal is to enable the engagement of our employees. To measure progress on engagement, we have been surveying our team about their engagement with Hilti in the annual Global Employee Opinion Survey (GEOS) for more than 20 years. We gather specific feedback on the content areas of leadership, team, organization, strategy, development, inclusion and more.
We use the following categories to assess engagement:
- Say: “I recommend Hilti to others as a great place to work.”
- Stay: “It would take a lot to get me to leave this organization.”
- Strive: “Hilti inspires me to do my best every day.”
The percentages of positive responses to these three questions result in an overall score, the “Employee Engagement Score”. We have set ourselves the goal of being in the top quartile of all participating organizations. In 2020, 91 percent of our team members participated in the GEOS survey and took the time to write 19,000 comments. The proportion of employee engagement has increased from 71.5 to 74 percent. With top quartile results in six regions, our headquarters and most global functions, we reduced the gap to the global top quartile to three percentage points. Now it is a question of closing the remaining gap with a unified effort and the consistent implementation of our personnel strategy.
GEOS Employee Engagement Score
A Great Place to Work
We are proud to have received the 2019 “Best place to work®” award by Glassdoor in the U.S. and to be on the list of Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work® in 2020 in the UK. We were also recognized by the Great Place to Work For® Institute among the best places to work in 2020 on several occasions: We were ranked 14th best employer in Europe and were among the top 10 in Sweden, Poland, Spain and the Netherlands. These awards are a testament to our investment in our team members and our culture.
Employee Turnover
One result of our human resources strategy and our caring and performance oriented corporate culture is reflected in our turnover rate. At 6.4 percent, this was also low in 2020. Our goal is to keep it at a low level in the long term compared to the norm of the industry.
Employee turnover1 by gender
1 Employees who voluntarily left our organization.
Another focus of our people strategy is to attract and further develop talents and consequently create a strong succession pipeline. An important component in achieving these goals is the creation of an inclusive environment. By this we mean a working environment in which people can contribute their strengths, feel comfortable and have the courage to go new ways and try things out. At the same time, we have high expectations on the behavior of our employees. Inclusion is not a project for us, but instead an attitude that we maintain in the entire Group. We understand diversity as the sum of the diverse attitudes, ideas, experiences and strengths of our workforce. This diversity and the use of these potentials promotes imagination and creates the necessary friction for progress. We focus on three concrete aspects – the 3Gs:
- Gender
- Global
- Generation
We deliberately set target ambitions for these indicators instead of rigid quotas: We aim to ensure that our workforce is as diverse as possible with regard to the 3Gs. For example, the proportion of women in the workforce has increased from 18.6 to 25.5 percent since 2010.
25.5%
share of women in Hilti’s workforce
Employees by gender 2020
| Female | Male | Non-binary | Total | |
| Executive Board | 0 | 6 | 0 | 6 |
| Executive Management Team | 28 | 149 | 0 | 177 |
| 2nd Management Level | 1,147 | 4,156 | 0 | 5,303 |
| Employees | 6,403 | 17,656 | 1 | 24,060 |
| Total | 7,578 | 21,967 | 1 | 29,546 |
Our new “MOMENT” people approach, which reinforces our long-standing priority on personal and professional growth, focuses on further driving employee engagement, creating an environment where all team members can be engaged. The concept is based on four principles:
- Frequent conversations
- Taking action Now
- Ownership
- Focus on strengths
Frequent conversations and direct feedback to reflect on the progress of goals and one’s own further development are central elements of this concept. More than 100,000 goals have already been documented on our new Workday digital platform. At the end of the reporting year, 82 percent of employees had documented their development discussion in the system.
Our People Strategy
Number/proportion of employees with development discussions 2020
Our team leaders play a central role in implementing this people approach and an inclusive work environment. In addition to the team members themselves, they are responsible for an inclusive approach to the team, for the personal and content-related development of their team members and, as a result, for achieving excellent results.
Promoting an inclusive organization: This is a leadership task that cannot be delegated.
Christoph Loos,
CEO
We use learning to sensitize our team leaders to the topics of inclusion and diversity. Since 2015, we have trained 80 percent of our 2500 team leaders on the issue of unconscious bias with our “Beyond Bias” workshop. This training continues to be part of familiarizing all new team leaders with our corporate culture. In the 2020 reporting year, we expanded our Group-wide learning offer with the format “Leading inclusively”: We collected real cases where people felt they have not been treated in an inclusive way and turned these into video scenarios where our team leaders can practice, reflect and learn how to create a more inclusive environment.
In addition, team members can also network independently to promote inclusion and diversity. In “Employee Resource Groups” (ERG), employees meet with regard to topics relevant to them such as environmental protection or diversity. They can inform, support and advise each other in a safe environment and develop relevant solutions for them, which the respective organization then implements. ERGs can form at the local level as well as in the Group-wide international context. As needed, they receive non-material or financial support from our Group.
To make our position on inclusion and diversity known to the entire Hilti team, we also hold open events. For example, we conducted three Awareness Weeks for the 3Gs in the reporting year. The first theme week in March took place around International Women’s Day. In various internal communication channels, events and quizzes, we conveyed facts and drew attention to unconscious prejudices and stereotypes. Theme weeks on diversity and age differences followed in May and October.
Organizational anchoring
Our Head of Global Human Resources who reports to a member of the Executive Board is responsible for the Group-wide strategic personnel orientation. Within Human Resources, our own global centers of excellence address the topics of talent acquisition, talent management, learning and development, diversity and inclusion as well as reward, social benefits and health. In addition, strategic and operational human resource teams work in local organizations to support the organization during transformations, implement programs and support team leaders and members in their work.
To make full use of the diversity of our global team, an inclusive environment is essential – this enables all team members to fully develop their potential.
Sabine Krauss,
Global Head of Human Resources
Management systems and policies
Fair relations, respect for human rights, freedom of association and equal opportunities: These are the basis of the core labor standards of the International Labor Organization (ILO), which are a matter of course for us. Our own ambition exceeds this by far. Our corporate culture, our values and our human resource strategy provide an important framework for cooperation within our Group. Our Group-wide Code of Conduct and our Anti-Discrimination Policy are among our key internal regulations.
We regularly check our processes and compliance with the guidelines through internal audits. In addition, we also have external reviews carried out according to recognized standards. A large number of our organizations worldwide have ISO 9001 certification, which covers a total of 87 percent of our employees. This is supplemented by local standards, for example with regard to remuneration. For example, we use the recognized tool Logib for our organizations in Liechtenstein and Switzerland to analyze our remuneration practices with regard to wage and salary equality.
Violations of internal or external regulations are not tolerated. In addition to the respective team leaders and members representatives (if available locally), contact persons are available in our global and local compliance organizations.
Learning &
DEVELOPMENT
Developing our employees is our focus and one of our core competencies.
WORK-LIFE
BALANCE AND
RESILIENCE
We have taken short-term measures to protect our team members in the best possible way.