Employee Experience
New Ways of Working
Organizational Evolution
Growing Talent
For goals and planned key actions for 2024 and beyond, please refer to the full Combined Annual Report 2023.
Borealis is proud of its culture and the employees who live it day by day at the Group’s locations. People are key to Borealis’ daily achievements.
Borealis’ global People & Culture (P&C) organization provides people-related support and guidance to leaders and employees throughout their careers. It is led by the Vice President (VP) P&C, who reports to the CEO. P&C provides the governance frame and services including talent acquisition and onboarding, organizational and individual development, change management, and compensation and benefits.
Together with the Executive Board, the VP P&C identifies how P&C can best support the Group’s strategy and initiatives. This informs Borealis’ P&C Strategy 2030, which is titled “People Make it Happen”. The strategy has four pillars: employee experience, new ways of working, organizational evolution and growing talent, all of which are powered by transformational leadership.
From January 1, 2024, a new organizational P&C structure to meet future challenges and needs became effective. This will further support the implementation of the P&C strategy.
The Borealis P&C Handbook sets out the Group’s P&C governance. This is managed through the Borealis People Policy and a set of Group procedures and operative instructions, covering areas such as performance management, including bonuses and development, the Borealis Incentive Plan, succession planning and talent management. The Borealis Management System collates all these documents in one system.
Borealis measures to talent acquisition, performance management, mobility, people engagement and data quality via key performance indicators (KPIs) in the P&C Dashboard. Each of the four pillars in the P&C strategy also has a mix of leading and lagging KPIs.
Based on the output from the Remuneration Committee and the Pension & Benefits Council, the Executive Board gives P&C a mandate to design new concepts for remuneration and to propose changes when needed. The Pension & Benefits Council, which is chaired by the CFO, sets the overall principles for employee benefit programs, monitors their implementation across the Group and decides on significant changes to them.
In Borealis, 82% of all employees are covered by collective bargaining agreements. In some countries there are no comparable agreements, especially in Eastern Europe where these mechanisms do not exist. However, Borealis adheres to the applicable industry terms and conditions.
Borealis’ core people administration is centrally managed using SAP. The system includes payroll, organizational management, time management, competence management, merit and long-term incentive plans, as well as data on all employees. Digital approval processes support a state-of-the-art employee experience.
Borealis also uses SuccessFactors, a cloud solution interfaced with the SAP system, to help employees and leaders make better use of important P&C processes. SuccessFactors includes Employee Profile, Learning, Succession Planning and Talent Management, Performance and Recruitment modules.
Borealis runs open forums and town halls, where all employees are invited to meet Executive Board members and senior management, receive updates and ask questions. Common topics discussed include the Group’s financial performance and Group initiatives. Borealis also regularly uses other information and engagement channels, including announcements via the intranet, leadership conferences followed by leaders cascading information to their teams, and Executive Board Open Forums held by the CEO, another Executive Board member or a VP. These channels were still important during 2023, to keep employees informed about economic developments.
Since 2020, Borealis has also offered employees the opportunity to provide feedback through the annual Pulse Check, a short employee survey with specific questions. The 2023 Pulse Check again covered the whole OMV Group, enabling Borealis to understand employee engagement and drive meaningful actions (including changes of procedures if needed) based on lessons learned sessions with the teams. Within Borealis, the 2023 Pulse Check achieved a 3-percentage point increase in response rate from 77% to 80%, and the Group managed to keep the engagement rate stable, while navigating through its transformation. Nevertheless, this result is not satisfactory and in-depth analysis and action plans were defined in collaboration with the Group’s people.
Borealis adheres to the legal requirements for consultation and negotiations, as part of the collective bargaining embedded in European, national and/or sectoral collective agreements.
Borealis is part of OMV Group’s European Works Council (EWC), which cooperates closely with the trade unions representing employees. The Corporate Cooperation Council (CCC) was Borealis’ previous forum for exchanging information between the works councils at its locations and top management. From January 1, 2023, the CCC was dissolved and a Borealis subcommittee in the OMV Group EWC has been formed, to handle social topics applicable only to Borealis’ employees. This continues the Group’s constructive cooperation with its employees and ensures there is sufficient focus on Borealis-specific changes, projects and initiatives that require employee representatives to be informed or consulted.
Significant operational changes affecting employees and their representatives are discussed and aligned through the works councils before implementation. For example, in some locations this could entail the entitlement to form written advice following a consultation approach. In smaller locations, where there are no works councils or employee representatives, the alignment is done with the location leader or representative. There is no common minimum notice period for operational changes throughout the Group and the approach varies depending on the scale and impact of the change and in line with the respective national legal obligations.
In 2023, Borealis increased its efforts to reach all employees with wellbeing initiatives and to standardize its approach. This included developing and launching a brand name (Care2) for the Group’s wellbeing initiatives, to give them a strong and recognizable identity. The brand name links to the Group’s values (see below) and to a well-established concept (Take2) from Borealis’ Safety standards.
Borealis continued to organize numerous local wellbeing initiatives, to ensure the topic is brought to the attention of all employees. These included massages and yoga sessions, healthy lifestyle workshops, mental health apps, psychological support via external professionals and special rates for gyms.
These activities were complemented by Borealis’ annual wellbeing calendar, ensuring Group-wide focus on central wellbeing themes. These themes included a Group-wide step challenge, team dialogues to support social interactions, and theme days on happiness and mind-body wellness. Each year, the calendar will contain both similar and new activities and focus topics, reflecting employee needs at the time.
The Group has Employee Assistance Programs, which enable employees to access support in areas such as coaching and consulting in physical and mental health, professionally as well as privately. During the year, Borealis actively promoted the programs, to raise awareness of the help available.
Borealis believes that building the right culture creates competitive advantage, by harnessing behaviors that will lead to future business success. Having clear values underpins a strong culture and signals what is important to everyone in the organization.
In April 2023, new Values were launched. While the Values are common to all three OMV Group companies, they strongly reflect Borealis’ culture and employees. The new Values were designed to be straightforward, easy to remember and, most importantly, simple to put into practice.
The Values are:
To be effective, the Values need to be well-embedded in the organization and a tangible part of employees’ daily lives. To achieve this, Borealis supported the launch of the Values with traditional communication campaigns and a range of other initiatives. These included running tailored team reflection sessions and creating a network of individuals throughout the Group to act as change agents, by cascading and role modeling the Values, both formally and informally. The Group also ran leadership activation sessions, which used behavioral experimentation, peer learning and storytelling to solve real-world business challenges by applying the new Values. This resulted in more than 120 active Values experiments across the OMV Group during Q2 2023.
Diversity and equity of opportunity are integral elements of Borealis’ open and inclusive culture. Borealis’ DE&I journey began in 2020 and has gained momentum as a result of increasingly close alignment with the OMV Group, resulting in a common DE&I framework and a joint program of activities and events. In 2023, Borealis, OMV and OMV Petrom further aligned their ambitions by defining a joint DE&I vision.
OMV Group DE&I Vision
We want to become an organization where our differences are embraced, and our diversity of thought and experience is used as a catalyst for growth and creativity. We will actively remove barriers to provide equitable opportunity, allowing each one of us to grow and contribute to the success of our companies. We will build a culture of trust and respect, working together to ensure an inclusive and safe space for everyone to be their full selves.
Borealis’ approach to increasing diversity includes a continuous focus on encouraging more women to join all levels of the organization. This includes:
Borealis’ DE&I focus goes beyond gender and includes, but is not limited to, generations; internationality; employees with special needs or impairment; parents and caregivers; and acting as Allies to LGBTQI+ colleagues. This broader scope has been made possible by leveraging the OMV Group’s resources and a growing pool of DE&I Volunteers and Ambassadors, from every part of the Group’s operations and workforce. Together with them, Borealis is developing a DE&I Transformation Roadmap and delivering an annual calendar of DE&I activities to raise awareness, shift perspectives, and cultivate a curious and inclusive mindset throughout the workforce. This will enable Borealis to access the full breadth of thought and experience available in the organization.
Diversity and employee engagement goals are included in the Group Scorecard to track the effectiveness of the actions taken, which determines management bonuses, and as part of the ESG criteria determining rewards under the Long Term Incentive Plan (LTI), to promote the Group’s long-term development. As Borealis is positively improving, the Group’s lessons learned show no mitigating actions need to be taken.
Borealis ensures that it protects employee data by following a clearly defined data protection procedure, outlined in an Work Instruction specifically for P&C.
The Work Instruction covers P&C authorization and defines, for example, who has access to which P&C data and how to request authorization and approval workflows. Borealis also ensures that it complies with the 8th EU Directive, which requires the Group to monitor critical authorizations such as salary data and ensure segregation of duties.
P&C closely aligns with the Group Data Protection Experts in the Legal function, to regularly follow up on data protection issues and ensure ongoing training for relevant stakeholders. Trust Arc is the Group’s guiding tool for documenting General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)-relevant processes. The Group also continuously aligns with OMV on data protection topics and, in particular, on intercompany data exchange matters. The Group has a common process for new IT applications, to ensure GDPR conformity.
Borealis looks to routinely train and develop employees, as well as external people who work with and for the Group. Providing appropriate training for functional and workplace skills that are rooted in Borealis’ values, safety and ethics ambitions helps the Group to protect the health and safety of all employees, conduct business ethically and ensure production processes and products are safe. It also helps employees to advance their careers within Borealis. Some training programs are developed and delivered jointly across the OMV Group, such as global coaching and language offers, and the Online Learning Library provided by LinkedIn Learning.
Every employee has a mandatory annual goal setting dialogue with their line manager, where they set goals for the year ahead, analyze skills gaps and define an Individual Development Plan (IDP), which includes the employee’s training needs. Employees with performance gaps have mandatory Performance Improvements Plans.
Training needs are also identified using Borealis’ Competence Profiles. These exist for most technical roles and enable the Group to assess employees’ skill levels and gaps. The Group has reviewed the Competence Profiles to ensure they continue to fit the Group strategy. Competences are also a basis for the new process of strategic workforce planning.
When new mandatory e-learning solutions are required, they are developed with the relevant internal customers and business owners and reviewed and steered by the Executive Board. Borealis also regularly updates existing training programs, such as the online learning package “Winning Work Skills” through LinkedIn Learning, and the similar “Accelerate Leadership” package, aimed at the leadership level.
Borealis has continued to broaden its sustainability training. This includes expanding the Sustainability Academy, which provides a comprehensive set of training courses that are appropriate to employees’ specific roles. In 2023, four new learning packages were released: Climate Change and ESG; Circular Economy and Sustainable Products; Human Rights; and Hydrogen.
The Group has also begun providing an employee guide to sustainability, as a selection of LinkedIn Learning courses, as well as a similar course aimed at the leadership level. When an employee’s job at Borealis ends because of retirement or termination of employment, the Group offers transition assistance programs to facilitate their continued employability and the management of career endings.
1) DYM SOLUTION CO., LTD, mtm compact GmbH, mtm plastics GmbH, Rosier Group, Rialti S.p.A and Renasci N.V. are excluded from e-learning courses. // 2) Due to the divestment, only the first half of the year to June 30, 2023 is reported. The figures are, therefore, not fully comparable.
To help Borealis attract and recruit the talent of tomorrow, even in difficult markets, the Group promotes diversity and mobility, and focuses on providing a positive candidate experience in every interaction with Borealis. Activities to attract new talent range from proactive talent sourcing and targeted partnerships with external organizations, schools and universities, to using innovative interviewing tools and personal interaction with all stakeholders involved in the process. This enables candidates to experience Borealis’ employer brand, Values and culture throughout the hiring process.
1) Talent programs: Pool 1, Pool 2, Pool 3, Experts. Leadership programs: IMD Leading for the Future, New Leaders program, Shenergy // 2) Due to the divestment in the first half of 2023, Fertilizer, Melamine and TEN is excluded from this figure.
1) As the performance and career development cycle ends on March 31, figures are only available from the previous cycle (2022). The rate is influenced by employees that are not eligible for a bonus (e.g. new hires in Q4) and therefore did not participate in performance management within the period. // 2) Numbers are correct to two decimal places in order to maintain granularity. // 3) Employee category grade refers to the internal role classification system (grade 1 to 21): Senior leaders: all line managers grade 16 and above. Managers: all line managers grade 12 to grade 15. Team leaders: all line managers grade 11 and below. Experts: all non-line managers grade 10 and above; Administration (white-collar employees): non-line managers grade 1 to grade 9. Bluecollar employees: non-line managers grade 1 to grade 9. // 4) DYM SOLUTION CO., LTD, Ecoplast Kunststoffrecycling GmbH, mtm compact GmbH, mtm plastics GmbH, Rialti S.p.A and Renasci N.V. are excluded from this figure. // 5) Due to the divestment in the first half of 2023, Fertilizer, Melamine and TEN is excluded from this figure.
In 2023, Borealis created a new “Employer Value Proposition” and employer branding. These enable Borealis to effectively communicate to potential employees what makes it stand out as an employer. The research phase involved Borealis’ employees and leaders, as well as an external market view. This enabled the Group to capture a complete understanding of the unique, authentic and aspirational components of the Employer Value Proposition. In 2024, the Group will continue to integrate the new employer branding into P&C processes, to help create a consistent and positive employee experience. To raise the profile of its employer brand, the Group increased the frequency of people-related posts on its LinkedIn page during the year. As part of Borealis’ approach to continuous improvement, the Group reviewed and enhanced its employee referral program in 2023. This is a structured program to find talented people, by asking employees to recommend candidates from their private and professional networks. Based on internal feedback and best practice, Borealis simplified the program to make referrals easier. The ultimate goal is to fill more than 20% of externally filled vacancies via referrals. In 2023, the Group achieved a 10% referral rate, compared to 4.5% in 2022.
Borealis looks to continuously promote and strengthen diversity in its recruitment processes, by consciously focusing on it at each step. This includes actively creating awareness with hiring managers and discussing diversity in the intake with them, offering unconscious bias interview courses, ensuring job advertisements are gender neutral and having diverse panel members at the selection stage.
Borealis is committed to providing fair and transparent reward packages for all employees. Fair remuneration means ensuring pay for performance, based on transparent performance evaluation. It supports strong business results by incentivizing high-performing individuals and teams, increasing employees’ retention and enhancing Borealis’ reputation in the labor market.
Every employee reward package at Borealis consists of a base salary and incentive compensation, with an annual bonus for all eligible employees and the LTI for Executive Board and senior management. The criteria for determining bonus payouts include a sustainability element and the LTI also has ESG criteria, including DE&I and CO2 emissions. The structure of bonuses and the LTI mean employees from the Executive Board down are incentivized to ensure Borealis is continuously increasing its sustainability.
The ratio of the annual total compensation for the organization’s highest-paid individual to the median annual total compensation for all employees (excluding the highest-paid individual) is 26:1 in 2023. Since this ratio is available for the first time, no comparison can be made to previous years.
The total package is based on the systematic evaluation of roles, using an external evaluation methodology linked to Borealis’ internal grading structure. This requires up-to-date role descriptions which define core activities and responsibilities. Each grade in the Group’s grading system has a country-specific pay range and the pay position of employees within this range is monitored at both country and Group levels, to control overall gender pay equality. The Group shares this aggregated gender pay analysis with its employees, as legally defined in the various countries. Employees are also entitled to information about how their salary compares to the respective market.
Reward packages are evaluated regularly in the context of insights into national remuneration market data and developments. This ensures that the reward package is competitive both internally and externally. Borealis also performs a yearly equal pay analysis, to identify focus areas for improvement.
The Group always pays entry-level salaries that are above the minimum defined in the respective national laws, collective labor agreement or company agreement. Borealis also requires this for leasing employees and has agreements with its leasing agencies in place.
Fair remuneration requires an effective performance management process, including managing low performers. Through the performance evaluation, Borealis assigns each employee a rating, which is calibrated throughout the process in a bottom-up approach, to ensure consistency and a normal distribution. A combination of ratings and potential helps to identify employees for the Talent Leadership and Talent Expert Pools. The outcome of the ratings drives the employee’s IDP and the merit process (salary increase) for the following year and is communicated via line managers in the Q1 Performance Dialogue.
Borealis has a global framework covering the design, financing, delivery and control of core global and local employee benefit programs, such as pension plans or insurance related to retirement, death, disability or medical benefits. This framework ensures employee benefits comply with Borealis’ Employee Benefits Strategy and guiding principles.
Borealis’ defined benefit pension plans are in general closed or grandfathered. Due to a legal obligation for a minimum interest guarantee in Belgium, this also includes defined contribution plans.
Concerning the projected benefit obligation as well as the fair value of plan assets of these defined benefit obligations, please refer to the full Combined Annual Report 2023.
The Group also sponsors other post-employment benefit plans that provide medical or severance benefits. In addition, it provides other long-term employee benefits such as pre-pension and jubilee benefits in various countries.
Where separate funds for paying the plan’s pension liabilities (e.g. Belgium) are available this is shown as fair value of plan assets according to IFRS. Plan assets will be provided in January 2024 when the actuarial reports are finalized. If no fair value of plan assets is indicated, no separate funds for paying the plan’s pension liabilities are available.
Flexible homeworking benefits both Borealis and its employees. It provides a choice of when and where employees may work for optimal results, with homeworking allowing for increased focus, productivity and execution of tasks, and office working focused on collaboration, interaction and meetings. This hybrid working also supports Borealis’ wellbeing commitments to support employees’ work-life balance. External benchmarking also shows that hybrid workplace solutions have a positive influence on work performance and productivity, increase employee engagement and loyalty, foster a more diverse workforce and improve overall attraction and retention.
Borealis introduced a Hybrid Workplace Group guideline in 2021 and revised it in 2023, based on employees’ feedback. Borealis now provides employees with even greater flexibility, as it allows them to work up to 50% from home, when appropriate.
Strategic workforce planning enables a company to ensure it has the workforce it will need to successfully implement its overall business strategy. The Group designed its strategic workforce planning approach and framework with support from Deloitte. Following Executive Board approval of the approach, Borealis successfully piloted it within a business unit in Polyolefins, as well as in the P&C and Digital/IT organizations. To support the implementation, P&C prepared training materials and carried out training for relevant Heads of Business Partners (BPs) and Stream BPs in P&C. The Group has also introduced a new people analytics tool, to support the strategic planning process. The roll-out of the process will continue in 2024.
Development Offering meaningful careers and ways to unlock people’s potential is essential for attracting and retaining a highly skilled, qualified and diverse workforce. The Borealis Talent Management Process focuses on attracting, identifying, promoting and developing people with the potential for leadership and expert positions. The Group’s leadership and expert talent management programs focus on developing the tools, skills and experiences the employee needs for their future role, along with the respective core competencies and expectations.
The Leading Ahead Top Talent program launched last year with OMV and OMV Petrom has replaced Borealis’ most senior leadership talent program and offers the Group’s high-potential employees an even broader career platform. In 2023, the first participants graduated and nominations continued for the second and third program runs.
In 2023, a cross-OMV Group project team worked to align and update a set of leadership competencies. These clearly define the expectations of leaders and complete the transformation framework for Borealis, which also comprises the Group Purpose, Strategy 2030 and the Values. The Transformational Leadership Competencies (TLC) were launched in October.
Work was also done to design and tender a comprehensive transformational leadership program, to offer a skills upgrade to all leaders in the Group. However, due to the economic downturn, Borealis paused these activities and will rejoin the program at a later stage. As an alternative, a new online learning path was created to foster knowledge and understanding of the TLC.
In 2023, Borealis employed 6,012 people in Base Chemicals and Polyolefins (excluding educational contracts). This compared to 5,914 in 2022 (excluding Fertilizers, Melamine and TEN). Of these, 98% (5,887) worked for Borealis on a permanent basis (2022: 97%) and 2% (125) were employed on a temporary basis (2022: 3%). This workforce was supported by 73 (72 in 2022) leasing employees who are not employed by the Group, primarily in Austria and Germany, and some 300 summer workers, job students, apprentices and interns.
1) Non-employees: The most common type of worker and their contractual relationship with the organization are leasing employees. The type of work they perform is blue collar work. // 2) Definition of significant fluctuations is a deviation in the number of employees during two consecutive reporting periods of more than 50 employees within a single organizational unit (equals 10% of Borealis’ definition of significant location of operation) // 3) Due to the divestment in the first half of 2023, Fertilizer, Melamine and TEN is excluded from this figure.
Employee experience
New ways of working
Organizational evolution
Growing Talent
Transformational Leadership
For more details, please refer to the full Combined Annual Report 2023.
