At Vandemoortele, we believe a dynamic mixture of people from various backgrounds, with different experience levels and skills creates a recipe for success. Let's share our recent progress in the 'diversity & inclusion' department.
Read more on our goal of 'Enhancing Lives'
As an organisation, we consciously aim to have Diversity & Inclusion in our work environment. It is one of our commitments within the Enhancing Lives goal in the Sustainable strategy.
Vandemoortele employs about 4,000 people from different backgrounds, in addition to several hundreds of temporary workers in function of our activities. We welcome people regardless of age, gender, disability, marriage or civil partnership status, pregnancy or maternity, race, religion, political opinion or beliefs. Out goal is to maintain this standard, by increasing the awareness of biases among associates involved in the recruitment process and by measuring applicant demographics throughout the enrolment procedure.
Providing a diverse and inclusive workplace
In the course of this year, we achieved the majority of our 2022 D&I targets. For example, the representation of women at leadership. Three years ago, we started with a representation of 21%. Having 28% as our goal for 2022, we did slightly better than anticipated. Right now, we have a female ‘leadership’ representation rate of 29,5%.
For other topics, like the % of female successors, we reached a representation of 58%. This will help to improve the representation of women at all levels at Vandemoortele.
Further, we are closing the remaining gender pay gaps gradually. Overall, we started off the year - still having a gender pay gap of 3%. Looking at the overall market gap of 14% in Europe, we are already above average. Before the end of 2025, we aim to close our gap. The situation will be measured again, together with an expert organisation, and we will - as usual - be transparent about this. Our next focus areas will be ethnicity and conviction (religion).
FURTHER STEPS
Since providing a diverse & inclusive workplace is crucial for us, Vandemoortele is taking further steps. We are paying attention to D&I through the whole associate life cycle, starting from the hiring experience and onboarding process. Also further in our associates' professional journey, we support everyone equally in their personal and professional development. We strive to ensure fairness in performance management, evaluations and in reward management.
"We want to make each associate feel at home and feel accepted for who they are and what they stand for", says Marc Croonen, Chief Human Resources, Sustainability & Communication. "And clearly, we are making progress. Our associates gave positive feedback in our company-wide Vandemoortele Engagement Survey 2022 - Over 2 You. The score for ‘diversity & inclusion’ improved further: from 79% to 82%."
TESTIMONIAL
It goes without saying we like to listen to what our associates think of the culture at Vandemoortele. Rohitash 'Rohit' Kumar, Performance Marketing Manager, shared his opinion on diversity and inclusion. He said: “People from different roots and origins are represented at the headquarter of Vandemoortele in Ghent. I personally think that regardless of who they are or what they do for the company, they feel equally important and supported.”
