Diversity and Inclusion

Including and celebrating different people and opinions is embedded in our growth story. We are committed to fostering diverse teams that reflect the communities we serve, and to creating an inclusive environment where everyone’s unique perspectives are valued and heard. By constantly building a diverse and inclusive workplace, we enrich our decision-making and provide ever more innovative solutions and shared value.

OUR STRATEGY is:

Bring your whole self to work
We commit to ensuring everyone feels they belong in our workplace; that they can be their authentic selves without fear of judgement.

Open communication
We promote top-down and bottom-up communication, and we’re transparent about our areas for improvement.

Leadership
We enable our leaders to develop and promote inclusive behaviours every day.

Data 
We use data and evidence of what works to track our progress and to ensure a strategy that maximises impact.

This is underpinned by embedding Diversity and Inclusion into our talent and other processes and ensuring our HR team is enabled to act as an agent of change.

Leadership

Setting the ‘tone from the top’, our CEO Zoran Bogdanovic, has signed the LEAD Europe Network CEO pledge to accelerate gender equality and inclusion. Zoran has also acted as a judge for the WeQual Awards, which are aimed at showcasing and promoting female leaders.

To enable inclusive leadership throughout our business, five Inclusive Leadership modules, available in several languages, form part of our core curriculum, and we have targeted learning for hiring managers and Recruiters, as well as running practical workshops on how to disrupt unconscious bias.

Our Policies

Our Inclusion and Diversity and Anti-Harassment Policy, and Human Rights policy set out our commitment to advance equality and to fair treatment and opportunities.

Our Aspiration

In 2018, we introduced a beacon commitment to have 50% women managers by 2025. By end of 2023, 41.8% of managers were women. We are building on the progress we’ve made, with growth year-on-year, with initiatives including changes in our talent processes and our development programmes to accelerate gender equality across our business.

In detail all our 2025 gender target commitments below:

Women’s networks and events

Our women’s networks, in our Corporate Service Centre and in several of our Business Units, connect and empower women across our business. Members come together to share experiences and learning, helping to foster individual professional development, as well as shape our organisation’s culture. 

For International Women’s Day 2020, we hosted a System women’s networks’ event, opened by our CEO, with inspirational women leaders sharing their perspectives on their careers. 

Communications

Diversity and Inclusion campaigns have been run across all our markets, raising awareness and understanding of the importance of D & I for our people and our business, including a video of four of our Executive Leadership Team members sharing their perspectives. We’ve also run International Women’s Day campaigns, #NoJobHasAGender, and promoted women role model stories, #WomenofCCHBC.

LEARNING

In 2019, we introduced five online Inclusive Leadership modules that drive understanding and share practical ways of managing diverse teams to maximise their impact. The modules are designed to ensure leaders are committed to promoting workforce diversity and an inclusive environment; know what behaviours will promote an inclusive environment; and are enabled to lead diverse teams effectively, maximising the benefit of different views and perspectives on innovation, the quality of decision-making and productivity. We also hold workshops with our HR teams to enable them to disrupt unconscious bias, given their role as enablers of change.

REPORTING INCIDENTS

Our group Inclusion and Diversity, and Anti-Harassment, Policy outlines the process to raise concerns and our commitment to deal with those promptly and thoroughly. In addition, all of our countries have a local grievance process that meets company-wide minimum standards for the steps that need to be followed in managing employee complaints. Incidents can be raised to the employee’s manager, second line manager or Human Resources. We have a Speak Up line, too  where employees, or external parties, can raise concerns anonymously if they wish.  All complaints of any form of discrimination or harassment are taken seriously and thoroughly investigated in good time by an impartial party. Findings are reported back to the complainant and corrective action, including disciplinary action where required, is taken promptly. 

Monitoring progress

At Group and Business Unit level, we’ve introduced dashboards that allow our leaders to monitor progress on key metrics, driving accountability for change.

By end 2023:

By Nationality

In 2023, there were 75 nationalities represented in our workforce, with the most common being Egypt (18% of our workforce and 9,9% of our total management population), Russian (16,6% and 14,5% in our workforce and management respectively), Nigerian (8,7% and 5,9%), Greek(6.3% and 10.6%), Italian (6,2% and 8,0%) and Polish (5% and 6.3%) which reflects the relatively large size of our markets in those countries.

Engagement by gender and age group