Even as a large, multinational company, Sika has maintained its agility, which allows the company to implement business opportunities quickly. To ensure that this remains the case, employee knowledge must keep up with current trends and market demands. That’s why Sika invests in its employees to promote business resilience by improving their skills, knowledge, and expertise as well as attracting diverse talents, in terms of age, gender, and culture.
Talent attraction and retention
The attraction, retention, and development of talent is key for future Sika growth prospects. Therefore, talent shortage is deemed as one of the top risks for Sika in the Enterprise Risk Management framework. Sika's fast growth and the diversification of the markets will demand numerous management and technical talents, so highly targeted hiring and retention measures are very important to mitigate another risk: the loss of the unique Sika culture.
To mitigate such risks, the company implements several measures which are reviewed and updated yearly. Sika's Talent Management program aims to improve people development through comprehensive training offering. Also, the Learning and Development function offers a myriad of skillsbased programs supporting the continuous improvement of all employees. Overall, these functions form the Sika Business School. This paves the way to achieving an engaged workforce and fosters a high-performance culture. In addition, the following activites help Sika attract and retain talent:
- Sika Employee Survey, Leadership Commitment, Sika Day and Women of Sika campaign, which aim at preserving Sika’s unique culture.
- Fostering international careers by offering attractive opportunities to work abroad and supporting assignees with customized agreements based on the international assignment framework and guidelines.
- Annual Alignment of HR strategy review on regional and functional level among Corporate/Regional Management (i.e., succession planning, talent review).
- Deployment of Success Factors as a global HRIS which provides new insights through reporting and analytics in global workforce and talent pool.
- Pilot phase of the Global Performance Debrief Dialogue (PDD) initiative to encourage meaningful debrief conversations between managers and employees and integrate continuous feedback into the daily business life.
Training Initiatives
Sika’s Leadership Programs (L&D) team organizes a broad range of internal and external training programs based on the Group Management’s strategic initiatives and works closely with General Managers, Regional HR Managers, Area HR Managers, Country HR Managers, and other key business leaders to identify focus areas. Sika’s offering is structured around three pillars, focusing on trainings and strategic talent management: talent management and leadership trainings portfolio; sales training, professional skills trainings, and Sika academies in the areas of procurement, operations, and sustainability.
Sika Business School
The Sika Business School provides more than 70 programs which, during the reporting year, have shown a 95% attendance rate. More than 60% of all Sika Business School courses are sales-oriented and aim to develop sales skills within the company.
Sika Sustainability Academy
Sustainability is an important business pillar, a competitive advantage and a key component of the company’s innovation drive and Growth Strategy 2023. The Sika Sustainability Academy is Sika’s flagship global sustainability education program, providing the necessary skills, methods, and practical examples to the participants in the countries to develop, coordinate, and implement local activities and projects in all sustainability focus areas to contribute to Sika’s sustainability strategy.
Subject-specific Academies
The Sika Operations Academy provides training for Operations managers to develop and increase their knowledge about how to run a manufacturing facility with a short, medium, and long-term approach. This initiative allows the establishment of an international network among Operations, Plant, Engineering Managers, aimed at sharing challenges, advice and best demonstrated practices within Sika. The Academy normally takes place annually.
The Sika Procurement Academy took place for the first time in 2022. The goal of the Academy is to strengthen and develop the skills of procurement team members working at corporate, regional, and local levels by sharing knowledge and best demonstrated practices (BDPs), and by building a strong network among employees in attendance. The Procurement Academy will take place once per year.
The Sika Concrete Academy was founded in 2009. Every year, 15 to 25 trainings are conducted across the regions for up to 150 participants. The main goal is to allow Sika sales and technical employees from around the world to build knowledge and provide competent concrete consulting at the customers’ sites.
The Sika Industry Academy is the global learning environment of Sika Industry and Global Business. The Academy provides employees with the necessary technical skills to successfully perform in markets with increasingly challenging requirements. The Academy offers training for sales representatives, account managers, employees of local technical departments, R&D functions, and customer service representatives.
Local Sustainability Champions
Local Sustainability Champions support the local management and teams in analyzing and prioritizing focus areas, codeveloping a “More Value – Less Impact” roadmap, initiating and coordinating activities with business relevance and building up a local sustainability committee to engage employees on all levels.