Diversity must be promoted, protected and appreciated
Greiner is its 11,238 employees. Greiner is diversity. We love this diversity, we value it and want to promote it. Particularly as an internationally active company, we benefit from intercultural competences, the diversity of the languages, different life concepts and different approaches of our employees.
A diversity of culture and ethnic origin, age, gender, skin color, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, mental and physical skills as well as different life and work circumstances makes us stronger. This is why we have developed a diversity guiding principle that is intended to help us create a common and uniform understanding of diversity. We want to promote diversity not simply because the Convention on Human Rights and the European Charter of Fundamental Rights have legally enshrined the principle of equality and non-discrimination in our personal and professional lives. We promote diversity because heterogeneous teams better equip us to understand the requirements of our heterogeneous customers in a national and international context and successfully develop the right solutions. That is why we proactively advocate diversity, multiple perspectives and equal opportunities.
“We want to increase the share of females in management positions to 35 percent by 2025 and to 50 percent outside production.”
We create an organizational culture in which individual, social and cultural diversity are appreciated, and people are not rated according to clichés, stereotypes or prejudices. We see the competent handling of diversity as an indispensable quality feature in Greiner management competence. The different perspectives of the genders enlarge our potential for innovation and make it possible for us to develop better solutions for our customers. In order to support equality, and in particular the promotion of women, we have set ourselves the goal of increasing the share of female managers to 35 percent by 2025 and to 50 percent outside production.
The reconcilability of family and job is a special concern of ours as a family-run company. We want to support parents who have a duty of care and in particular women to rejoin the workforce. Greiner has also become far more diverse in terms of age. We consider this a valuable enrichment and an opportunity. The contribution of different experiences and perspectives of people from different age groups and career levels is decisive for our corporate success. In light of this, it is natural for us that we want to cater to the needs of the various age groups in our company with their different requirements. In order to guarantee equal opportunities in the best possible way and not leave any room for discrimination, we established a whistle-blowing platform. Employees, customers and business partners can all report discrimination of any form anonymously at tell-greiner.com.
Distribution of our 11,238 women and men by division1
Share of women per work area
Administration
Production
Make equality a given
Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEP) are principles for managing a company to empower women at work, on the labor market and in the community. Under the caption “equality means business”, the principles stress the economic advantages gained through gender equality and the empowerment of women in companies. According to the WEP, the main principles of an equal management culture are:
- Treating all men and women fairly at work
- Promoting women’s education, training and career advancement
- Promoting equality through community initiatives and advocacy as well
- Measuring and reporting progress on issues of equality.
By signing, Greiner supports the Women’s Empowerment Principles and we undertake to advance the implementation of equal opportunities and the promotion of women at our company. This includes scrutinizing and changing traditional structures and environments at our company if these are found to present an obstacle to better equality at Greiner. We are fully aware that this is not a process that we can implement overnight. Nevertheless, we will continue this step by step to achieve the level of Greiner excellence that we strive for in other areas of our corporate culture in this area of management, too. Accordingly, we also want to apply the theme of this report to equality of opportunity and the promotion of women: If not us, who?
Focus on gender pay gap
Given that there are still substantial income disparities between men and women in Austria and that the Austrian pay gap is far higher than the EU average, the Austrian Federal Ministry of Labor, Family and Youth allows the provision of consultancy services for companies to design transparent remuneration system and fair career opportunities. We take part in this project as a result of the high standards we set ourselves for issues of equality. It helps us generate even more information on fair pay between men and women and use this to establish measures, including related to income and career planning. This project also ties in with the findings from the salary analysis carried out as part of our Organizational Clarity initiative and helps us further develop the internal company equality policy.
Women in management positions
Greiner
Greiner Bio-One
Greiner Packaging
NEVEON
Greiner Extrusion
“We have set ourselves goals in order to support equality, and in particular the promotion of women.”
Resolving the family life/work life contradiction
Increasing the share of women in management positions to 35 percent by 2025 requires creating the conditions for a better work-life balance. One way that Greiner Packaging has taken a real step towards achieving this balance is allowing management positions to temporarily be filled as part-time roles. To make the workplace more flexible, employees can work in the office or remotely (including outside the context of any Covid-19 related regulations on working from home).
Making it easier to return from maternity leave
To ease back into their return to work, Greiner Packaging will arrange talks with employees during maternity leave to better organize their return to the company and make planning this easier for both parties. Initially, this takes the form of an informal chat with their manager. This lets Greiner employees stay up to date with what is going on at the company, ensuring that they are informed of any substantial changes before returning to work. These discussions to prepare for a smooth return to work can also serve as an opportunity to take account of individual needs, for example any care responsibilities. We would also like these conversations to cover employees’ career plans and work expectations so that they can return to our company to a role where they can make best use of their skills.