Employees

As a socially responsible company, Bayer has long been committed to upholding and supporting human rights at various levels. The main principles used to respect human rights at Bayer are set out in our Human Rights Position [ 118 ]. We respect the United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights [ 119 ] and are a founding member of the UN Global Compact [ 120 ]. Bayer’s mission, life values and Corporate Compliance Policy [ 121 ] commit all employees around the world to fair and lawful conduct toward staff, colleagues, business partners and customers.

Our commitment to respect human rights within our sphere of influence is a central element in our corporate philosophy. As a global company, we see fostering human rights as not simply representing a social and ethical commitment, but also a business-related requirement. At the heart is our reputation as an attractive, sustainability-oriented employer and business partner. We are convinced that our clear approach raises the satisfaction and identification of our employees with our company, meets customers’ expectations and minimizes reputational risks that could damage our business.

To raise the awareness of employees around the world regarding the importance of human rights in our day-to-day activities, we have developed a variety of training measures within the Group. The information and training program on human rights, which was introduced in 2008, has now been integrated into mandatory human rights training sessions or obligatory compliance training at many of our sites. For example, in September 2011 we introduced a special online training program on our Human Rights Position for employees at Group companies in China. By the end of March 2012 over 1,200 employees at these companies had completed this training program. Using a variety of methods, we trained about 36,000 employees around the world on the content of our Human Rights Position and its practical application in 2011. Another 10,000 employees undertook our online training on compliance and lawful conduct.

Employee representation is part of our commitment to responsible conduct and collaboration. The working conditions for 54 percent (2010: 55 percent) of our employees are governed by collective or company agreements. The slight drop is due to a reduction in the number of U.S. employees who are members of a labor union and an increase in the headcount in countries where there are either no collective agreements or they do not cover all employees. In the United States an ombudsman previously acted as a neutral point of contact for employees in cases of possible violations of our Human Rights Position. These duties have been assumed by the regular compliance organization since the end of last year.

In China, the establishment of unionized employee councils, which started in 1997, continued in 2011 with the inclusion of two more Group companies. This means nine companies there now have elected councils representing some 3,000 employees. In Pakistan, South Korea and Slovenia, we renewed existing collective agreements in 2011 or extended their content. 

Central elements of our human resources policy are motivating employees and steadily developing their abilities. Last year we continued to drive forward the international alignment of our human resources activities. In October 2011, for instance, we held our first Global Human Resources (HR) Conference, attended by about 100 HR managers from around the world. This was supplemented by our first global satisfaction survey. Nearly 30,000 employees used this opportunity to tell us how they view Bayer’s Human Resources function.

Among the measures adopted to strengthen the Leadership component of our LIFE values and promote performance orientation in the company is an innovative training program we have developed to support our managers in regularly giving their employees frank, constructive feedback on their work and conduct. The goal is to establish a feedback culture throughout the enterprise that specifically addresses employees’ individual strengths and weaknesses, and thus enhances their personal and professional development over the long term. All members of the Group Leadership Circle – about 400 of the company’s most senior managers – took part in the training program last year. In 2012 it has been extended to the other management levels as well.

Our endeavors to improve the feedback culture at Bayer are a response to the outcome of our first global employee survey, which was conducted in September 2010. Specific action has been taken to make a lasting improvement in areas where employees revealed scope for improvement. Steps have also been taken to achieve a further improvement in aspects which the majority of employees rated as positive. One example is our new global Safety Day to heighten awareness in the area of occupational safety. Other activities are designed to communicate the Group’s strategy more directly. They include a regular newsletter from Management Board Chairman Dr. Marijn Dekkers, the “Ask the CEO” [ 122 ] feature on the Bayer News Channel (BNC), employee assemblies and management meetings with the subgroups’ boards of management. The subgroups and service companies have implemented many projects to improve customer focus. There have also been numerous activities in employees’ immediate work environments.

The second Group-wide employee survey, which started in March 2012, will show to what extent these activities have helped eliminate weaknesses in our corporate culture. Once again, all employees worldwide are called upon to express their views on the company and their personal working conditions anonymously by answering a total of 60 questions. As with the first survey, the focus is on employee commitment, which is seen as the most important indicator.

An important principle of our human resources policy is linking employees’ compensation to their performance and enabling them to share in the company’s success. Regular benchmarking against competitors and a globally standardized system help us to set base salaries in line with the demands and responsibilities of each position. These salaries are supplemented by performance-related compensation components and extensive fringe benefits.

In 2011 more than €600 million in variable bonus payments were made to our employees under the Group-wide short-term incentive (STI) program, which is based on corporate performance. In addition, various employee stock participation programs [ 123 ] enable our staff to purchase shares in Bayer at a discount. In many countries, these are part of our extensive fringe benefits and offer employees a further opportunity to participate in the company’s business performance. We also offer senior and middle managers throughout the Group uniform stock-based compensation programs known as “Aspire” that are based on ambitious earnings targets and – in the case of Group Leadership Circle members – require an appropriate personal investment in Bayer stock.

Our human resources policy also includes ensuring a high level of social protection. Health insurance cover is provided for almost all employees worldwide either under statutory plans or through company health care offerings. In many countries we extended the private health insurance benefits provided for our employees and, in some cases, their families as well last year. Examples are Morocco, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines and Poland.

The Company Pension Plans Directive in the Bayer Group confirms the enormous significance of company-financed pension plans, both in positioning Bayer as a preferred employer and as part of our responsibility toward our employees. At the end of 2011 almost 70 percent of Group employees had access to a company pension plan (more information can be found in the Annual Report 2011). 

Fostering the diversity of employees and ensuring optimal inclusion of all employee groups in our activities is one of Bayer’s top strategic priorities. Since 2007 it has been firmly anchored in the Declaration on Diversity at Bayer [ 124 ]. Through workshops we aim to raise managers’ awareness of the benefits of greater diversity of employees so that people have equal career opportunities at Bayer and are also able to participate in our programs to encourage the development of managers regardless of their gender, nationality, origins and beliefs. We are convinced that, especially at management level, diversity is one of the keys to the future competitiveness of our company. It improves our understanding of changing markets and consumer groups, gives us access to a broader pool of talented employees, and enables us to benefit from the enhanced innovative and problem-solving abilities that are demonstrably associated with a more diverse employee structure.

To bundle our Group-wide activities in the area of diversity and drive forward their strategic application, in 2011 we created the position of Global Head of Diversity & Inclusion at Bayer AG.

The growing number of people we employ in the emerging markets, especially China, reflects and spurs on our efforts to make our global workforce more diverse and international. Of the members of our Group Leadership Circle, in which 22 nationalities are currently represented, some 70 percent come from the country in which they are employed. Overall, the Bayer Group currently employs people of 127 nationalities. Upholding and fostering this cultural diversity is thus an important aspect of our diversity strategy. In 2011, for example, we introduced the innovative online tool “GlobeSmart,” which gives employees access to information about etiquette and communication behaviors in more than 60 countries. The goal is to strengthen employees’ competence in working with colleagues and customers from different cultures. In addition, there are a large number of employee networks [ 125 ] to encourage diversity in the Group, especially in the United States.

Our commitment to equality of opportunity is also reflected in our compensation system, which does not make any distinction between male and female employees. At Bayer, individual salaries are based on each employee’s personal and professional abilities and the level of responsibility assigned to them. At managerial level, this is based on uniform evaluation of all positions throughout the Group using the internationally recognized Hay method. In areas of the Group and jobs that fall within the scope of binding collective bargaining agreements, there are no differences in pay based on gender. This also applies for the compensation of trainees.

In March 2011 the company, along with nine individual managers, was named as defendant in a lawsuit filed against Group companies in the United States by current and former employees alleging class gender discrimination. The lawsuit, applied for as a civil law class action, seeks to cover certain female employees who are, have been or will be employed by the company from 2009 to the date of judgment. The plaintiffs seek compensatory and punitive damages, attorneys’ fees and other forms of compensation. The case is at an early stage. The company believes it has meritorious defenses and will continue to vigorously defend this matter.

Flexible worktime arrangements help employees balance work with personal or family life. Such arrangements specifically benefit working parents. In all countries, Bayer offers its employees a range of opportunities to vary their working hours. These range from flexible worktime models and part-time employment through teleworking to additional leave and the provision of childcare for employees with children. In 2011 the Bayer Group had nearly 8,200 part-time employees, around 7.2 percent of the total headcount.

Around 80 percent of employees in Germany who took part in the statutory parental leave program over the past five years have now returned to work. 90 percent of them are female and 10 percent male. For technical reasons, no comparative data on the number of employees returning from parental leave are available for other countries.

Demographic change is a challenge, especially for many industrialized countries. It involves both opportunities and risks. We have prepared forecasts of the age structure of the workforce in the entire Bayer Group up to 2020 in order to assess the importance of this issue for our human resources policy. Currently, we are not facing an acute shortage of skilled staff. We are continuing to train at a high level and are also regarded as an attractive employer by skilled staff from outside. This was again confirmed by many accolades [ 126 ] in 2011. Further details of these can be found in our online report.

At the same time, we are stepping up our efforts to utilize and develop the potential of older employees even more effectively. Passing on knowledge within the company from the older to the younger generation is the aim of the Bayer Senior Experts Network, known as BaySEN [ 127 ] for short. This measure is supplemented by the ongoing expansion of occupational health management.

The General Works Agreement on lifetime working and demographic change [ 128 ], which came into effect in Germany at the end of 2010, shows how smartly Bayer combines the various aspects of managing demographic change in its human resources policy. More information can be found in our online report.

Integrating and supporting disabled employees is another significant issue for Bayer worldwide. We employ people with disabilities in around 40 countries. Most of them work for our companies in Germany, where they made up 4.7 percent of the workforce in 2011, compared with 4.4 percent in 2010. Around 30 percent of disabled employees were female. The relatively high proportion of employees with disabilities in Germany is due to their particularly widespread integration there.

Traditionally, advocacy of people with disabilities has also been particularly strong in the United States. Since 1999, our U.S. headquarters in Pittsburgh has run a program to foster the training and employment of people with disabilities.

Bayer aims to appeal to the best and most talented people worldwide and to retain employees for long periods by providing good development opportunities, a modern working environment and competitive compensation. In 2011 we again succeeded in attracting a total of more than 5,300 new academically qualified specialists and managers worldwide. More than 40 percent of them were female. We recruited nearly 1,900 university graduates in China alone, some 750 in India, roughly 400 in Germany and more than 250 in the United States.

In 2011 nearly 12,000 new people were hired across all occupations. Women also accounted for more than 40 percent of total new hires. In addition, more than 3,000 challenging internships were awarded to talented young students worldwide to give them pre-graduation insight into the variety of career opportunities at Bayer. Such young people often return to us as employees at a later date. The majority of these internships were completed by young women. Through this and the fact that more than 40 percent of new graduates recruited to the Group are female, we are confident that we will be able to achieve a significant increase in the proportion of female managers in the medium term.

This success in recruiting is partly due to our intensive marketing activities to draw the attention of students, university graduates and young professionals to the interesting entry-level opportunities [ 129 ] and career prospects at Bayer. An important recruitment tool, alongside the well-known social networks on the internet, is a presence at recruitment fairs and university events. In Italy, India, Singapore and the Philippines we have extended the strong links we already had to universities and supplemented them with further recruiting alliances. In India and Hong Kong, Bayer MaterialScience has established a scholarship and a trainee program for talented university students.

Apart from the hiring of university graduates, the company’s own vocational training programs for young people are among the most important steps taken to guard against a possible shortage of specialists due to demographic change. Once again in 2011 more than 900 young people began training courses in a total of some 50 occupations at our German sites. For the past seven years, Bayer has offered vocational training in excess of its own requirements through the Rhineland Vocational Training Initiative, which accepted 150 school graduates as trainees in 2011. We also train specialists to meet our requirements in other countries. One example is Finland, where 12 production workers have qualified as machine operators on a new vocational training program. For many years now, we have regularly offered a program of theoretical and practical training in different careers for young people in a number of countries in Latin America. In 2011 we had around 100 trainees in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Peru and Ecuador, around 12 percent more than in the previous year. They received vocational training to German standards, based on the German curriculum.

We are convinced that the quality and productivity of our employees worldwide are extremely important for Bayer‘s future competitiveness. In 2011 we therefore developed a new broadly based talent management strategy. Its new elements are now gradually being rolled out in the company. The goal is to support employees in the optimal development of their strengths at Bayer so they can contribute to the Group‘s business performance.

Ongoing training of employees has always been another important aspect of human resources policy. In 2011 we maintained our offering of advanced training courses for employees at a high level worldwide, supplementing it with numerous new programs. For example, we again provided nearly 50,000 training sessions throughout the Group in the areas of occupational safety and health protection via our successful “Pegasus” online training program. Overall, we invested more than €123 million in vocational and ongoing training of employees in 2011. In absolute terms, our expenditure on vocational training was slightly down on the previous year. The actual proportion of personnel expenses spent on ongoing training dropped more steeply to 1.4 percent, however, due to a sharp rise in other personnel expenses. 

Apart from the acquisition, expansion and retention of specialist knowledge, a further focus of our training programs [ 130 ] is on improving leadership skills. In 2011 we introduced our standardized Group-wide management seminar “Bayer Leadership Excellence,” already offered in Europe and the United States, in Brazil and countries in the Asia/Pacific region. This extension of our program is supported by last year’s launch of the global Bayer Training Community, an exchange forum for the staff who provide training for Bayer’s managers. In this way, we ensure identical content and quality standards for management training worldwide.

Many programs and initiatives throughout the Group are dedicated to the professional and personal development of employees. In Australia, for instance, we have introduced “One Bayer,” a uniform talent management process for sales and marketing staff there. Since last year, managers and talented employees in Poland have been able to use a new mentoring program to support their development. The “Helping Yourself Succeed” program in the United States comprises an online portal with tips and information on career development, which can be supplemented by workshops and individual coaching.

Last year the 360° feedback program was used by all managers in South Korea with personnel responsibility to help them improve their leadership style. In all, more than 1,800 employees worldwide took part in our established 360° feedback program last year. Another 4,200 used the structured Development Dialogue with their supervisor to drive forward their professional development.
Exchange programs are another talent management tool that offer gifted employees the opportunity to gain experience outside their normal working environment by working on international projects. For example, in 2011 three young marketing managers from Portugal were able to play a part in the global marketing strategy for major medicines at Bayer Pharma’s headquarters in Berlin.

Preventing accidents and safeguarding the health of our employees in the workplace is a central element of our responsibility. Through our foresighted occupational safety and health management programs, we also reduce costs by avoiding damage and production stoppages. Extensive risk management to identify and assess the potential risks and shape a healthy working environment is therefore a key element of our activities in the area of Health, Safety, Environmental Protection and Quality (HSEQ).

Our HSEQ management activities support the Responsible Care Global Charter [ 131 ], a voluntary global initiative of the chemical industry. This illustrates our objective of minimizing risks to people, the environment and the company and integrating HSEQ management into all our business strategies and processes. In line with this, we have issued Group-wide directives on occupational health and safety. In addition, the subgroups and service companies have their own systems, committees and working groups to manage HSEQ. At the global Safety Day held for the first time on September 13, 2011 all Bayer companies provided a simultaneous signal of the commitment to improving occupational safety [ 132 ] and protecting health.

There was a further reduction in the number of occupational injuries to Bayer employees resulting in lost workdays in 2011. The long-term downtrend in this indicator therefore continued. Action taken by the subgroups and some service companies made a considerable contribution to this good performance.

In line with internationally accepted standards, we altered reporting of occupational injuries in 2011, replacing our former parameter – the number of injuries per million hours worked (MAQ rate) – by the Lost Time Recordable Incident Rate (LTRIR). The LTRIR is based on 200,000 employee working hours and includes work-related illnesses.

As in the past, in 2011 we hardly registered any typical injuries involving contact with chemicals; most injuries were caused by tripping or when people were walking. Numerous programs, training sessions and measures are designed to help reduce the number of injuries still further.

We also track injuries to Bayer employees requiring medical treatment that goes beyond simple first aid. This indicator covers both injuries resulting in lost workdays and those that do not lead to this. It is measured by the Recordable Incident Rate (RIR). In 2011 the RIR dropped to 0.56 per 200,000 hours worked (2010: 0.62). Regrettably, there were three work-related fatalities in 2011. They comprised two traffic accidents in India in which three people were killed.

Since employees are expected to work until they are older and the demands made on them are rising, our occupational health management is designed to maintain and strengthen the health and working ability of our workforce. Group-wide we offer our employees a wide variety of benefits to promote their health [ 133 ]. These range from medical checkups and on-site medical services to sports opportunities inside and outside the company and the provision of advice and reintegration assistance after recovery from an illness. In this way we also contribute significantly to maintaining long-term working ability. In the reporting period, 14 new cases of illness directly attributable to work-related factors were diagnosed. We report such cases as soon as they have been diagnosed by a medical officer and officially recognized.

In the United States the “B Well” health promotion program was introduced for employees and their families. The goal is to add a new quality to the health culture. The aims are to reduce health risks through information and prevention, improve case management of illnesses and achieve a higher participation rate than in previous programs. Phone-based health coaching was also introduced, supplemented by advice from company medical officers. In Germany, we introduced a range of voluntary health check-ups under the General Works Agreement on lifetime working and demographic change to encourage employees to adopt a more healthy lifestyle.

Bayer companies in other countries organize similar programs. For example, a “Work-Life Balance Program” was initiated in Brazil in 2011, with offerings ranging from free vaccinations through sports to “company clinics” with local physicians. In Colombia Bayer supports its employees by offering health check-ups, and fitness and stress prevention programs. Last year Bayer Indonesia introduced a cholesterol check as part of its annual health screening. In Australia and New Zealand we also produce an online health magazine to give employees sports and dietary tips.

In countries where there are shortfalls in the public health care offering we offer our employees supplementary private health insurance. The scope of such programs is regularly reviewed and extended where possible. Information on possible health risks is provided via the intranet for employees going on business trips and foreign assignments. The Group has a dedicated directive that defines the action to be taken in the event of pandemics since these tend to bring new and unforeseen health risks.