Diversity, equity, and inclusion go hand-in-hand. When you create a work environment where employees see a representation of various cultures, backgrounds, and ways of thinking, they’re more likely to feel comfortable being themselves. In this article you can read how our company contributes to the solution.
Our contribution to the solution
Our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) strategy focuses on:
- Culture: to truly learn from one another, we are strengthening our company culture and placing greater emphasis on people and good leadership. By communicating openly, we learn to get along with one another and behave in accordance with our company values.
- Work-life balance: a good balance between work and private life contributes to diversity and inclusion. That’s why we focus on commitment, trust, mentorship, smart working methods and flexible working conditions to allow for all kinds of family situations.
- Generation management: to stimulate innovative and creative working methods, our teams are made up of people of different ages.
Our targets and commitments
We ensure that all Athlon teams reflect the local communities of the countries in which they work. By 2025, we will set up at least 5 thematic networks on diversity and inclusion, which will focus on exchanging knowledge and mutual inspiration.
“In 2022, we created the DEI Changemakers network, a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion network on group level. The network includes ambassadors from all our markets. In this way, we create awareness, improve our recruiting and hiring processes, and embrace the change of mindset within our organization. Alongside this, we also started an International DEI Core team in order to support the group level network as much as possible.” – Youssef Saidi VP Legal
Our progress
In terms of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, our main target is for all Athlon teams to reflect their local communities. In 2022, we also started an international DEI Changemakers network. Every Athlon market is represented, and together we have co-created an annual DEI plan. In 2023, we will work on a DEI statement and on our recruitment processes.
We will monitor several indicators to manage our progress in this domain. The first two focus on gender: the percentage of women in our total employee base (44% in 2022), and the share of female leaders (31% in 2022). To better reflect the local community, we also want to increase the number of younger employees. In 2022, 8.8% of our leaders were aged under 40. As a fourth KPI, we want to raise the number of internships within Athlon by 10% each year. In 2022, this number was approximately the same as in 2021: we welcomed 146 interns. We encourage our leaders to increase the number of internships in 2023.
In this way, we want to offer opportunities to promising students who aspire to a career in sustainable mobility solutions. In turn, these young people stimulate our innovation.
A final indicator concerns our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion networks. By 2025, we will set up at least five thematic networks on DEI.
These networks will focus on exchanging knowledge and mutual inspiration.