Management

As of December 31, 2012, a total of 38,847 employees worked for us at 203 companies in 66 countries. In accordance with our values, we live a culture of mutual esteem and respect. Through our Social Charter, we commit ourselves to complying with fundamental labor and social standards, as well as the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) core labor standards, the UN Global Compact and the Responsible Care® program of the chemical industry. Through global policies and guidelines, we ensure that these standards are implemented at our sites even beyond the legal requirements.

Strategic goals

Our strategic goals for our employees include developing a culture of goal orientation and recognition of performance, combined with a global, systematic talent development process, a performance-related, market-oriented compensation structure, as well as the recruitment and retention of talented people in the long term. For this purpose, Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany has introduced global programs, for example the Performance Management Process and Global Rewards Policy, as well as the Talent and Succession Management Process. In the 2011-2012 period, we focused these programs even more on the needs of a global corporate group.

Since 2011, we have additionally increased our strategic focus on workforce diversity and fostering a culture of inclusion to benefit from that diversity, which we want to promote by means of targeted measures. These include, for example, our intention to increase the percentage of management positions held by women to between 25% and 30% by 2016.

Organization and responsibilities

Kai Beckmann, Executive Board Member and Chief Administration Officer, is responsible for Human Resources (HR). We reorganized our HR units in 2012. Group Human Resources (Group HR) steers all HR activities worldwide. Employees of Group HR in the legal entities are responsible for locally implementing these activities.

Group HR comprises the units Corporate HR, HR Business Partner and HR Services. Corporate HR develops all global policies, programs and guidelines for all HR-related topics. The HR Business Partners provide advice and support to the business units and legal entities; HR Services performs administrative services and supports all employees with regard to HR-related matters. In 2013, we will complete the transition to this structure in all local HR organizations.

Global recording of employee data and controlling

In order to measure the progress we are making in achieving our strategic goals, we collect employee data worldwide, which we record in various systems. This enables global reporting of demographic employee data and reporting lines as well as protection of sensitive data, such as salary information. We are currently introducing an integrated system called HR Suite for our global performance management, as well as for talent identification and assessment, recruitment, learning management, and compensation review. HR Suite will make our processes even more efficient and will further improve data analysis. In addition, Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany regularly monitors HR-related topics by means of internal audits.

Training and sensitizing employees

In the 2011-2012 period, we redesigned our management programs so that all employees with personnel responsibility obtain a uniform understanding of, and common approach to, management activities at Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany. This comprises properly applying HR processes and programs, as well as training in our Values, Code of Conduct, Social Charter, and diversity.

Outlook and goals

At the end of 2011, we launched a transformation program under the name “Fit for 2018” with the aim of securing our competitiveness in the long term. A key goal of this is to anchor an even stronger performance culture in the company. For us, this means setting clear expectations and goals for all our employees, providing regular and transparent feedback, as well as recognizing good performance. To this end, we have redesigned our existing HR programs and processes. Our transformation program faces the challenge of driving cultural change while continuing to implement personnel restructuring measures within the scope of the efficiency programs.