Employees and society
Employees
Our employees are the key to the success of BASF. We want to attract and retain talented people and support them in their career development. For years, BASF has been dedicated to improving staff competencies and motivation in order to maintain our competitive advantage.
At the end of 2021, BASF employed 11,070 people in Greater China (2020:8,948).
BASF's success is largely dependent on its ability to place the right people in the suitable jobs. In Greater China, we have put in place a number of recruitment strategies to attract potential candidates.
BASF’s "Grow" Graduate Program® is a competitive young talent training program dedicated to identifying and nurturing enthusiastic talent, who will lead the change and make an impact across Greater China. Through this program, young graduates will benefit from customized rotations, systematic learning opportunities, and on-the-job training while working alongside experienced leaders and professionals on various projects. This year, we initiated the BASF Zhanjiang Verbund Site Direct Hiring Program for graduates, which will assist BASF in identifying and cultivating young talent for the Zhanjiang Verbund site upon its commencement.
At BASF, we care about the health and safety as well as the well-being of our employees.
Collaboration with vocational schools plays a vital role in recruiting front-line talent across the country. The “School-Enterprise” collaboration aims to recruit graduates from vocational schools to become the backbone of the operations team for BASF sites. This year, we started in-depth collaborations with four vocational schools in Maoming (Guangdong), Lanzhou (Gansu), Yueyang (Hunan) and Zhuzhou (Hunan), with the goal of developing new talent for the BASF Zhanjiang Verbund site. BASF will collaborate with these schools to build new vocational curriculums that focus on operational training and provide students with hands-on experience.
BASF is committed to creating an inspiring working environment that enables employees to perform at their best.
BASF has accelerated the adoption and implementation of new digital tools, including Artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual interviews, to ride the wave of digitalization and fast-changing environment. AI enables the assessment of a broader range of candidates based on various parameters, such as interpersonal skills, communication skills, learning agility, problem-solving skills, and English proficiency. Due to the COVID-19 social distancing mandates, the adoption of virtual interviews also extended geographically to include overseas applicants, thereby further widening, and diversifying the candidate pool.
We, at BASF, believe that empowering our employees through a series of career development programs is the way forward to ensure our sustainable growth and business success.
The Senior Management of BASF Greater China shared the insights on the future development of the company with employees in a townhall meeting at the Chongqing site.
The Stand-Out Development Program was implemented to help BASF's talents broaden their network and business acumen by allowing them to work on a variety of company projects. Employees are exposed to new challenges to showcase their strengths and get guidance on their development areas from senior leaders and experts. They were assigned five projects in 2021 as part of this initiative. These projects were overseen and supported by senior management with an emphasis on inspiring creative solutions for business challenges. The program provides a great platform for talents to deeply grow and develop.
At BASF, the CORE Leadership Values – Creative, Open, Responsible, and Entrepreneurial – are the guiding principles that define our beliefs in developing and strengthening our leadership culture. The CORE Values not only describe BASF’s expectations for leadership behaviors but also define how we work with our teams, customers, and partners. In Greater China, the CORE Leadership Values are incorporated into the development projects and local training.
The “BASF Micro-Learning” WeChat Platform has created a resourceful and diversified learning journey for Greater China employees for more than two years. In 2021, over 1,000 courses and 1,274 online audio and video files were made available to employees who spent around 12,800 learning hours on this mobile platform.
BASF is committed to fostering a safe, healthy, and inclusive workplace to ensure that the well-being and needs of our employees are taken care of.
To foster employee engagement, various corporate events were organized in Greater China for our employees to participate in throughout the year. These included the “2021 BASF’s Family Day” organized for employees from different sites and business units, as well as a series of events around the country for BASF's Global Safety Days 2021.
To balance and support the needs of our employees in a diverse workforce, we continued to implement the Flexible Work Arrangements initiative last year. We offered flexibility in working hours and workplace settings outside the designated office space. As work-life balance has become one of the key advantages in the modern workplace, this helpful initiative is important for BASF in attracting and retaining talent.
The "2021 BASF Family Day" was held at Shanghai's Binjiang Forest Park with the participation of over 800 colleagues together with their family members.
In 2021, BASF’s Employee Portal continued to play a significant role in engaging employees, and in developing a digitally connected workplace culture. With the portal’s self-service features, it enables smoother workflows across departments, and improves employee communication efficiency for the latest corporate information and policies.
At BASF, we value workplace diversity and gender equality in order to achieve long-term success. That is why we intend to increase the proportion of women in leadership positions to 30% globally by 2030. We have made significant strides toward this goal. The global proportion of female leaders with disciplinary responsibility in the BASF Group was 25.6% at the end of 2021 (2020: 24.3%). In Greater China, the proportion of female leaders with disciplinary responsibility was 28.5% at the end of 2021.
In 2021, 26.9% of BASF employees in Greater China were female. The most substantial proportion (54.5%) of employees at BASF in Greater China was in the 26-39-year-old range.
