Our People and Culture

Overview

There is a broad range of cultural backgrounds within our global employee community. Across our global network, our workforce includes more than 100 different nationalities. Our employees are balanced across a range of different age groups, and our global gender split increased its proportion of females to 37% in 2023¹.

People are at the heart of our business and we strive to give our people the best possible experience. In 2023, we focused on improving the onboarding experience of new colleagues while enhancing growth opportunities and career development of all colleagues with a sustainable and competitive rewards program. We also prioritized continuous improvement across our people management initiatives. We deployed best-in-class digital solutions to enable data-driven decision making and we equipped our leaders with tailored leadership training programs. In addition, we invested time in assessing and evolving our talent and succession pipelines, which is another critical factor in Lonza’s sustained success.

All our programs and actions are guided by the Lonza People Strategy which is designed to enable our people to Come, Stay and Grow and Make a Meaningful Difference. We regularly monitor the progress and impact of these programs through our Voice of Employee (VoE) engagement survey.

Coming to Lonza (Attracting the Right People)

In 2023, we continued to build a strong pipeline of highly capable candidates who bring professional potential and create sustainable value for our business. More than 2,000 new colleagues joined us in 2023. Our recruitment activities focused most significantly on our Visp (CH), Houston (US) and Portsmouth (US) sites.

Our talent referral program, launched in 2022, proved to be highly effective in 2023. We onboarded over 500 colleagues in 2023, who were referred to us by current employees. In addition, we deployed our digital onboarding tool globally and designed a new framework for onboarding events at key sites, including our global headquarters in Basel. The feedback from participants continues to be very positive. This is reflected in a reduction of the voluntary turnover rate of colleagues with a tenure of below one year, from 10.7% (2022) to 10.4% (2023). 

We continue to review and adapt our programs to ensure we can attract industry leading talent to sustain the continued expansion of our employee community. This supports our business continuity and growth plans in the coming years.

Staying at Lonza (Fostering an Empowering Environment for our People)

Talent retention remained a key focus in 2023. With 8.3% voluntary turnover, we are trending in line with industry standard and are showing an improvement (from 10.7% in 2022).

In 2023, more than 750 colleagues benefited from our “Work from Anywhere” policy, which empowers employees to work in a different location for up to 28 days each year. We also focused on the continuation and expansion of our Wellbeing offering. Further information can be found on page 47 of the 2023 Sustainability Report. Looking to 2024, we will continue to review these programs to ensure they are competitive and meet the needs of our employees.

Our Lonza Bonus program is an important tool to reward sustained high performance, with our bonus payout determined by the company performance factor in combination with the personal performance factor. More information about the Lonza Bonus can be found in the Remuneration report on page 181. In addition, we expanded our employee share purchase plan to include additional key locations. This is designed to further enable our colleagues’ participation in our business success.

Growing at Lonza (Developing our People)

We remain committed to building a positive and motivating environment where our colleagues are inspired to grow. We launched a program in 2023 to guide and support professional development for employees by encouraging an open dialog between employees and their direct manager about their aspirations and development goals. We have also further embedded our Lonza Leadership Framework across the organization. This includes the integration of our “Care, Communicate and Coach” approach into all our people programs and campaigns. 

As part of our commitment to the UN’s SDG 4, we have established an internal learning system to support employee engagement and professional development. We have also formed a global training council to define and deploy Lonza’s global approach to training. 

Our focus on personal growth and professional learning as well as internal career development has resulted in an increase in positions filled with internal candidates, to 39.1% in 2023 (from 29.8% in 2022). We anticipate that these efforts to recognize the potential of internal talent will create a strong return on investment and positively impact business continuity. 

In 2024, we will continue to focus on leadership development and our culture of learning with a leading edge learning suite supported by best-in-class digital solutions.

Looking to 2024

Through our shared values of Integrity, Inclusion, Innovation and Initiative, we will continue to build and develop our “One Lonza” culture, which is recognized and respected by our colleagues across our global network. Together, we will continue to make a meaningful difference to fulfil our purpose of enabling a healthier world in 2024 and beyond.