Employees
For Klöckner & Co, qualified, motivated and healthy employees are the basis on which added value is created. We are committed to staff empowerment, safety, responsibility, credibility and sustainability. A motivating style of leadership, empowering people and fostering a culture of innovation through self-determination, talent development
and incentivization are the basis for this. They allow us to advance our innovative capacity, take advantage of opportunities and grow the value of our Company. We continuously optimize our organization, becoming more agile and adaptable to thrive in an environment of continuous change.
Key figures in 2022
Our working environment
Continuing education is a central component of our corporate culture. That is why we offer our employees a wide range of opportunities for further and personal training. The aim of our measures is to continuously improve and develop the qualifications and skills of our employees - particularly with regard to digitization - and to promote talent from within our own ranks. Most country organizations manage this independently and have their own HR developers for this purpose. The Group-wide employee strategy, our Klöckner & Co People Strategy, serves as a guiding framework for future-oriented employee management in the Group. Klöckner & Co attaches great importance to training measures. In 2022, more than 51,000 in-house courses were completed across the Group in a wide variety of areas. The majority of these were in the areas of IT security, compliance and digital skills development as part of the Digital Academy e-learning platform.
The 51,000 training courses do not include external, individual training measures. In reviews, our employees receive feedback on their behavior and performance up to four times a year, and individual wishes and training measures are defined in the respective target agreements. Particular importance is attached to our internal training programs: Clear Sales and Sales X for sales, Initial Development Program for junior staff development, Emerging Leaders Program and Leading for success for leadership potential development, Leadership Empowerment Program for managers and Senior Experience Program as development training 55+. Throughout the Group, Klöckner & Co offers young professionals and students the opportunity to work as interns and student trainees so that they can put their studies into practice and deepen their knowledge.
Occupational health and safety is a key issue for us as a steel distributor with a high percentage of wage earners employed at our branches. A healthy and safe working environment both protects our employees and ensures smooth process workflows.
At a corporate strategic level, all our occupational safety activities since 2013 have been brought together under the Safety 1st initiative. With guidance from a worldwide survey conducted in 2018titled Safety Perception, recommendations were made that serve as the basis for continuous improvements.
The Group-wide goal of our occupational safety initiatives and activities is a consistent reduction in occupational accidents as measured by the lost time injury frequency (LTIF). This is defined as the number of accidents/number of hours worked x 1,000,000. We take accidents into account from the first working day lost. Changes in the LTIF are a firm feature of regular Management and Supervisory Board meetings, in which monthly reporting is carried out. The LTIF was reduced from 7.0 in the prior year to 5.8 in 2022. This once again brought the Group-wide LTIF significantly below the self-imposed annual target value of less than or equal to 7.6. The target for 2023 is an LTIF value of less than or equal to 5.9.
For Klöckner & Co, fair working conditions are the basis for the motivation and hence the productivity of our employees. A working environment characterized by mutual respect and free from discrimination of any kind is a necessary precondition for comittment and creativity. In general, we strive to increase diversity in our workforce as well as foster creativity and an innovative spirit in the Company with employees of differing cultural backgrounds, lifestyles and values. In order to make diversity management more active and drive it forward in all dimensions, Klöckner & Co signed the Diversity Charter (Charta der Vielfalt) in April 2022. The association of the same name is the largest employer initiative in Germany to promote diversity in companies and institutions.
Irrespective of their location in Germany, the voluntary commitments made are valid throughout the Group. These include fostering a respectful organizational culture, recognizing diversity inside and outside the organization, and implementing the charter in internal and external dialog. With the Code of Conduct we have committed ourselves, among other things, to ensuring that our colleagues, applicants and business partners can expect respect from us and are judged according to their qualifications, competencies and performance. Our German offerings follow the quality standards of the "Fair Company" initiative, to which Klöckner & Co commits itself anew each year.
However, diversity of nationality is not the only important consideration for Klöckner & Co. We also aim to appoint women to specialist and management positions. The percentage of women employed at management levels one to three below board level has already been raised from 8% in 2011 to 16% Group-wide in 2022. The aim is to further increase their share to 21% by 2024.
The success of our approach to promoting women in managerial positions is demonstrated by the top-ten rankings in the 2015 to 2021 iterations of the “Frauen-Karriere-Index” (Women Career Index), a regular survey conducted by Barbara Lutz Index Management GmbH. In the 2022 survey, based on objective corporate data on the promotion of women in management positions, Klöckner & Co was singled out yet again as one of the top ten companies out of over 200 participants.
Our other action areas
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