Young people may be a minority of the global population, but they are key for our future. And that’s absolutely the case for Tetra Pak, the packaging and processing company, which has a future talent programme committed to recruit 200 fresh graduates every year, in 31 countries over 10 years to develop the next generation of engineering and leadership talent.
Last year 172 graduates, and this year a further 200 graduates, joined Tetra Pak under the scheme, the majority of whom are based in a potentially large future growth market: Asia. The company knows that it’s not enough to recruit young people, however: future-proofing its business means embracing diversity in all its forms and being a more inclusive organisation. “Tetra Pak has a responsibility to become a business more representative of society and the customers it serves,” says Gaby Youd, director of future talent and future work at Tetra Pak. “Diversity and inclusion are a business necessity for us,” she says.
“We are a global company, operating with a diverse range of customers in more than 160 countries,” she says. “Having a workforce that reflects that helps us contribute to diverse solutions and solve diverse customer needs.”
That’s why Tetra Pak recently conducted a thorough review into the challenges it faces in becoming more diverse, inclusive, and capable of attracting and nurturing the workforce of the future. The review found that unconscious bias and a lack of career support, plus a good work-life balance for employees, were the main hurdles.
In order to attempt to solve these issues, Tetra Pak is implementing flexible work schedules, career development webinars, diversity training and changing its recruitment process to attract people from a wider range of backgrounds, genders and geographies.
Recruiting women is a priority, and Tetra Pak would like to boost the proportion of female employees from the current 28% to 35% across the organisation to reflect external availability. But Youd points out that supply is an issue: last year alone, just 11% of the UK engineering workforce was female, and there are often far fewer female than male engineering students at universities around the world.
“Some of it has to do with women not seeing role models in engineering, not getting encouragement to enter the profession and, therefore, thinking that it’s not appropriate for a woman to be there,” Youd says. “It creates a negative cycle.”
Supriya Ajay, Tetra Pak’s HR process manager for the Middle East and Africa, says that, despite the challenges, improvements have been made. The proportion of women in the leadership track of the future talent programme now stands at 67%, for instance. “It’s really difficult to recruit women, but we are putting more effort into this, and the results are showing,” she says. “It’s a long-term process. We are still struggling with diversity on our technical track, which stands at about 5% women, but the journey has begun.”
As a woman who recently joined the company, Ajay provides some insight into what it’s like to work in the Dubai office, describing the workplace as “diverse, global, multi-cultural and cosmopolitan”.
She joined Tetra Pak two years ago, after working in HR for an oil and gas services company in Dubai, mainly because of the focus on diversity and inclusion. “I liked the idea of the future talent programme,” Ajay says. “I wanted to motivate the younger generation and build their careers, because the company benefits from getting a new style of thinking that can lead to innovation.”
She was also attracted to Tetra Pak by its corporate social responsibility initiatives. For instance, it launched the #MilkforChange campaign, to provide long-life milk to underprivileged communities in South Africa. Ajay says: “We are giving back to the populations we recruit from.”
Tetra Pak has created benchmarking tools to track progress on meeting diversity and inclusion performance – because that which gets measured usually gets done. One tool – an “inclusion index”, compiled via the company’s employee engagement survey – measures whether employees feel heard, and have constructive relationships and career development opportunities. “We will benchmark the results against external high-performing norms and would like to close the gap between ours and [the external norms],” says Youd.
Also in use is a diversity dashboard, an online system that executives use to gauge the composition of the company’s workforce in a particular business area, including by gender, age and nationality. By comparing the figures, executives can spot gaps across the organisation and take steps to close them.
Youd says that, should these measures bear fruit, a third pillar of the benchmarking strategy is to be recognised for external awards. “We want a visible conversation around the topic of diversity and inclusion,” she says.
It is more than just words – a diverse and inclusive workforce will benefit the bottom-line: it’s crucial for solving problems on an international scale, serving a globally spread customer base and making better business decisions.
Youd says: “We have the ambition to be leaders in our industry, and it’s changing tremendously with the challenges of sustainability and digitalisation. So getting people together with different areas of expertise, and having young people who can drive our digital business, is key.”
