Fair Employment
We strive to create an engaging and fair working environment, where the rights of our employees are respected and where every person can thrive.
Our approach
Our success is based on the engagement and performance of our employees. It is their dedication to delivering excellent solutions to our customers that helps us maintain and further develop our competitive global position. As a company with employees in over 50 countries, we aim to ensure an engaging working environment so that we are an employer of choice for current and prospective employees. We also ensure that we treat employees fairly and in accordance with our company values, and that we provide them with equal opportunities and fair remuneration.
Our approach towards our employees is governed primarily by our Code of Conduct, as well as by country-based labor regulations and the local employee handbooks, where available. Our Group-wide Responsible Labor Directive regulates the minimum business standards during recruitment, hiring, and employment in terms of freely chosen employment, working hours, wages, and benefits, the prevention of child labor, freedom of association, and workersʼ accommodation. Furthermore, the Zero Recruitment Fees Directive regulates the business standards regarding fees and costs associated with recruitment governed by the Employer Pays Principle. The Directives came into force in September 2021.
Key activities
Engaging our employees
High employee engagement has been proven to lead to increased productivity, fewer workplace accidents, and improved customer satisfaction. A key method for supporting employee engagement is to ensure a culture of open dialogue across the organization.
To monitor any changes in the level of employee engagement, we use a global norm as a benchmark1. Our target is to maintain our Employee Engagement score at or above the Global Norm (currently 72% favorable) until 2027. In FY 22/23, we launched the third round of our global employee survey, the dormakaba dialogue, and achieved an employee engagement score of 71%, a slight improvement versus our baseline.
Over 12,000 employees participated in the dormakaba dialogue, which represents a participation rate of approximately 74%. The survey consisted of a total of 32 items on topics such as Me & My Work Environment, My Manager, and Engagement. New this time were questions on Shape4Growth, our Behaviors, and three questions related to the topics of Inclusion and Well-being.
The main findings were:
- All three of the items on Inclusion and Well-being were rated very positively, two of them scoring above the Global Norm.
- The items on My Manager were answered very positively, with the vast majority of answers lying above the Global Norm.
- Compared to the previous survey in 2020, a strong increase can be seen in the responses on whether employees understand how they contribute to the overall success of dormakaba.
- The new Behaviors implemented this fiscal year proved to be a driving force for employee engagement, stressing their great importance.
- While more than half of the employees agree that we do act as one global team, this item needs our focus so we can grow together as a global organization.
- Another focus point is our external customers as our top priority in day-to-day decisions. The responses to this item show a slight decrease compared to the last survey in 2020, taking it below the Global Norm.
Based on the survey results, relevant teams will develop and follow up on action plans to improve the working environment at all levels of the organization. Senior management teams have reviewed and discussed their respective survey results and are addressing the development areas through a variety of actions. Furthermore, change management materials will further support the development of stronger teams.
There are further examples across the organization of measures that ensure a culture of open dialogue. In the Scanbalt countries, for example, the weekly employee engagement and satisfaction pulse checks have a constant participation rate of 85–90%. The tool helps local leadership gain a better understanding of the well-being of the employees, job satisfaction, and about topics such as health and safety, DE&I, remote working, and personal development. Since 2019, when the tool was implemented, employee turnover decreased from 35% to 6.5%, and sick leave from 18% to 5% by January 2023.
Our employees help create homes with Habitat for Humanity
For every place that matters. Our purpose reflects the contribution we make to society: we are where our communities come together – from locations across town to locations across the world. In this spirit, our employees worldwide have been taking action to help make a difference for families in need with the non-profit organization, Habitat for Humanity.
Over a period of three months, dormakaba employees had the chance to contribute to a charitable cause by completing our Sustainability eLearnings. During the #EveryActionMatters global campaign, dormakaba pledged to donate USD 10 to Habitat for Humanity International after each completed module. Thanks to the engagement of the employees globally, dormakaba donated USD 10,000 to the non-profit.
Besides this charitable campaign, our employees in the USA have been volunteering with Habitat for Humanity’s Greater Indy chapter since 2017 by building homes for those in need. So far, approximately 400 employees and more than 50 business partners have taken part in activities to make an impact in the community. Of these, almost 200 volunteers participated in FY 22/23.
As well as volunteering for construction work, our local entity also fits out the homes with dormakaba hardware, specifically intended for multi-housing light-commercial applications. “The spirit of giving back is in our core, and helping to create homes in our communities gives even more purpose to what we do at dormakaba,” says Justin Crotzer, SVP Global Product Development at dormakaba, who has been leading the partnership with Habitat for Humanity in the USA.
Read more about our employeesʼ community engagement work here.
Fair remuneration and benefits
An overview of best practice employment-related policies and benefits across the Group can be found in the Policies and Benefits Table.
We aim to establish fair compensation that is determined based on job function and relevant local market benchmarks. It is not influenced by personal attributes such as age, nationality, or gender. The global grading system ensures that functions are evaluated in a consistent manner across the organization. In addition, we provide locally specific benefits and welfare programs. In FY 22/23, for example, in the UAE we rolled out benefits during maternity leave that go beyond legal minimum requirements, and in the Region Americas, we have developed a more competitive compensation and benefit program, including wage adjustments, retirement program enhancements, a Flex-Work Program, and rewards and recognition enhancements. As stipulated in the Group Compensation Directive, we refrain from offering excessively low wages (i.e. wage dumping).
After having conducted social audits in Malaysia and Singapore, we were confronted with the fact that an especially vulnerable group, migrant workers, frequently pay fees to agencies, i.e., for the recruitment itself, travel, passport, and visa processing. To protect them, we have developed improvement actions and the Zero Recruitment Fees Directive, which regulates the minimum business standards regarding fees and costs associated with recruitment and was published in FY 21/22. It commits dormakaba to bearing the costs associated with any services rendered by respective migrant worker recruitment agencies. Fees discovered to have been paid by migrant workers have since been reimbursed.
In FY 22/23, we identified a few workers in our plant in Senai (Malaysia) that had paid recruitment fees. Local management then conducted individual interviews with each migrant worker to determine the amounts they had paid in the form of recruitment fees. All migrant workers will now be reimbursed in full, irrespective of whether they have receipts to support their claims. Furthermore, we have been conducting awareness raising actions to educate relevant stakeholders in the organization on the requirements of the Zero Recruitment Fees Directive, including launching a global self-assessment survey to gauge the level of implementation.
Employee attraction and retention
We strive to create a diverse and inclusive workplace, where everyone can be their authentic selves.
We aim to provide a working environment in which people can thrive and where everybody feels part of one team. We are proud of our diverse workforce, our openness, and our transparency and strive to create an inclusive workplace where everyone can be their authentic selves. All this is part of our company culture. We also provide our employees with professional development opportunities to retain our qualified workforce. When filling open positions, promoting from within our own workforce is preferred.
Many factors shape our culture, but the most important one is our behavior: how we work together and how we act towards our customers and colleagues. In FY 22/23 we introduced six Behaviors to describe our culture, so that we are clear on what we can expect from each other. The new Behaviors have been communicated through several channels to our employees and more than 500 managers took part in the Behaviors Management Training.
Another focus of this fiscal year was to globally streamline the end-to-end hiring process, including onboarding, and to improve the candidate experience. In order to achieve this, we started to build a global talent acquisition network that openly shared best practices and potential for advancement. In the Scanbalt countries we launched a digital onboarding tool, some parts of which are accessible for new employees one month before their start date. It has enabled us to secure every step of the onboarding process and achieve a 90% approval rating based on employee surveys.
Fluctuation
In FY 22/23, a total of 1,891 employees joined the company and 2,034 left within the reporting scope. This corresponds with rates of 13% and 14% respectively, which reflects a lower joiner rate than leaver rate. This can be explained by the recent organizational changes at dormakaba.
Employee fluctuation in Asia and the Americas was higher than in other regions, as in previous reporting periods. In the Americas, this is attributed to continued consolidation of manufacturing activities. The higher fluctuation in Asia Pacific is to be expected based on regional workforce trends.
In addition, in China, employees are usually appointed on the basis of fixed-term labor contracts before being eligible for an indefinite contract. This results in a temporal shift of the fluctuation rates for Asia Pacific and to a certain extent overall, since employees with permanent contracts joining and leaving dormakaba are counted only after their contracts have been converted (usually after the completion of two consecutive fixed-term contracts, in accordance with Chinese Labor Contract Law).
Outlook
In the next fiscal year, we will further globalize the Talent Acquisition organization and work in cross-country teams to improve the candidate experience, streamline processes and reduce complexity for both candidates and employees. We will also conduct living wage assessments with an external partner in all countries with more than 50 FTEs. Furthermore, a Behaviors eLearning will be launched in the first quarter of FY 23/24.