Nestlé in society Creating Shared Value and meeting our commitments 2015

Nestlé in society:
Creating Shared Value
Nutrition, health
and wellness
Rural development
Water
Environmental
sustainability
Human rights
and compliance
Our
people
Diversity and equal opportunity G4-DMA, Equal remuneration for women and men G4-DMA
Nestlé builds success and our culture on strong
diversity. We will accelerate gender balance. Women
represent 80% of our consumer spending decisions.
60% of graduates in the EU and the United States are
women. Improving gender balance will enrich our
leadership and improve consumer understanding.”
Paul Bulcke, Chief Executive Officer, Nestlé
Empowering women in
business, Mexico
In Mexico, we are building our capability and helping provide
opportunities for local women through the project Mi Dulce
Negocio. It aims to help inspire and encourage more women in
the workplace, by offering knowledge and practical experience
about food, nutrition and healthy eating habits, as well as food
preparation for selling. During 2014 and 2015, around 15 000
women received the training. Next steps include a pilot to support
women in the formal establishment of a catering business.
Bringing more women into our
factories, Chile
Nestlé Chile found that employing additional women at the
Graneros dairy factory reduced the site’s high absenteeism rate.
In 2013, when almost 80 employees were absent in one day,
the HR Team led a contributor analysis to identify potential root
causes. They attributed the reason to a ‘lack of commitment’,
but also discovered gender differences, where women
presented fewer absences and delays than men. The team
decided to test the findings, to see whether hiring extra women
into the factory would have a positive effect on absenteeism.
The HR Team defined a special recruitment campaign
targeting women that took place through employee referrals
and an external job posting. At the same time, the factory
improved working conditions with new toilets and dressing
facilities.
The positions were filled by women who had not worked
before, or who had worked in fruit packing but wanted better
work conditions. As a result, total annual absenteeism has
decreased by 22.6%, the production quality has remained
stable and the number of women on the production lines has
increased from 121 to 217, with a positive local impact.
Unconscious bias training
In 2015, we continued the global roll-out of our unconscious bias
training through a network of more than 80 trainers. The
activities are designed to promote more inclusive communication
between women and men to improve performance.
Line managers and senior managers attend a three-hour
interactive and experimental session that uses participative
exercises, case studies and videos. The structured learning
outlines visual blind spots, the ladder of inference to
understand unconscious bias, and cultural gender differences.
Our leaders can use the outcomes to develop a personal
and team action plan that will improve talent management
outcomes for men and women in the workplace.
By the end of 2015, a total of 3058 employees across our
business 4 had received the training since it began in 2014. Our
markets in the Middle East, India and the Nordics have already
embedded unconscious bias training into their leadership
training. Since the end of 2014, unconscious bias has also
been embedded in several central programmes, such as
Leadership, Marketing and Sales, Finance, R&D and
Technology Management.
One of the main challenges we have in diversity is to
recognise our own bias. It is clear that most of them
are unconscious, so the inclusion of an unconscious
bias course in our training curriculum is fundamental
to understand what it means and what we can do to
avoid wrong decision-making.”
Gilberto Rigolon, Head of T&D Talent
Acquisition, Nestlé Brazil
In all my 16 courses, I have delivered unconscious
bias sessions to young Nestlé executives and to the
ManCom of some of our markets (Portugal, Sweden
and Uzbekistan) as well. The reception was amazing,
here are a couple of comments from participants:
‘I know I have a lot of unconscious bias, but I didn’t
know how to avoid the negative effect of that. In this
session, I feel relieved and decided to practise those
counter actions repeatedly.’
‘This training was an eye-opener for me and I would
like it to be done for all employees in all markets.’”
Guy Bellenot, International Training Manager
for Rive-Reine
4 This is a cumulative figure, representing the total number of employees who have received
unconscious bias training since the programme began in 2014.
Nestlé in society – Creating Shared Value and meeting our commitments 2015 281