As of December 31, 2012, the Bayer Group employed 110,500 people worldwide. In Germany there were 34,600 employees, who made up 31.3 percent of the Group workforce. Personnel expenses rose in 2012 by 5.5 percent to approximately €9.2 billion.
Among the main facets of our human resources policy is our Group-wide talent management – the measures and tools to further our employees’ professional and personal development. Last year we established the Bayer Global Internal Job Board to better enable our employees to exploit career opportunities and help them actively shape their own career development within the enterprise. Since then, vacant positions up to and including senior management have been advertised internally throughout the Group on this globally accessible job platform. In this way, employees can obtain a clear overview of the internal job market and directly apply for interesting positions across the organization for which they are suitably qualified.
Providing training for our employees is fundamental both to talent management and to addressing the consequences of demographic change. In 2012 we maintained our offering of advanced training courses for employees at a high level worldwide and added a number of new features. Our successful “Pegasus” online training program about safety in the workplace was again used more than 36,000 times, and a total of over 28,000 – mainly managerial – employees have now completed our online training program on corporate compliance.
The Bayer Senior Experts Network is designed to utilize the knowledge and potential of retirees by employing them as consultants on important projects. Retirement is the start of a new phase in an employee’s life. It also involves changes for Bayer when the experience of long-serving employees, their expertise and broad general overview is suddenly no longer available to the company. This loss of knowledge will even increase in the future by demographic change. To counteract this problem, Bayer launched the Bayer Senior Experts Network (BaySEN) initiative at the end of 2010.
An important principle of Bayer‘s human resources policy is also to link employees‘ compensation to their performance and enable them to share in the company’s success. Regular benchmarking against competitors and a globally standardized system help in setting base salaries in line with the demands and responsibilities of each position. These salaries are supplemented by performance- related compensation components and extensive ancillary benefits.
