Inclusion & Diversity
In 2020, our employees faced new challenges such as working from home, combining work with caregiving or homeschooling, and managing their own and their family’s health. Ensuring that all our people felt included and cared for became more of a priority than ever. Fostering and maintaining an inclusive and diverse workplace is key to helping our employees offer their best, most authentic contribution, and is, therefore, a prerequisite to delivering on our strategic goals. While shifting social forces brought Inclusion & Diversity to the top of social and corporate agendas over the course of 2020, we began work on a new Inclusion & Diversity strategy in January, involving the input and support from global employee focus groups, senior leaders and external partners.
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2020 |
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2019 |
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Inclusion index1 |
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75% |
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72% |
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A new Inclusion & Diversity strategy with a new governance framework
Launched in October, the strategy broadens the scope of our existing Inclusion & Diversity focus. In addition to gender and internationalization, the new Inclusion & Diversity strategy now also includes the focus areas of disability, generations and LGBTQ+. As such, three new Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) were established: Generations (age), BLEND (race, ethnicity and national identity) and Valuable (disability), supplementing our existing ERGs WIN (women and gender) and Rainbow (LGBTQ+).
To support our new Inclusion & Diversity strategy, a new governance framework was established. It follows a business- and region-led approach and provides a seat at the table for all the global leads of the five ERGs. Each of the focus areas has an Executive Committee sponsor, while the revised Inclusion & Diversity Council is chaired by the Co-CEOs.
Alongside these activities, we continued to focus on existing Inclusion & Diversity commitments and targets. By the end of 2021 our targets are 25% women and 35% under-represented nationalities on executive level. Embedding these targets into people and organization change decisions will ensure we hardwire diversity into the DSM of the future. In 2020, we improved our Inclusion Index from 72% in 2019 to 75% in 2020.
External relations and support
DSM works with a broad range of external partners — including non-profit organizations, industry peers and public institutions — to build inclusive and diverse workplaces. Most notably, these include Catalyst, the World Economic Forum, Workplace Pride, and The Valuable 500.
