Differentiated solutions to support employee well-being*

As an employer, we take responsibility for the well-being of our people and offer a wide range of opportunities to optimize work-life balance and protect their health and safety.

Covid-19-related activities

Social distancing and face coverings, home working and home schooling: The Covid-19 pandemic is presenting our employees with new challenges. Our overriding priority is to ensure the health and safety of our employees and their families. However, maintaining our business processes and supporting customers and institutions, including in areas such as vaccine development, are also important aspects.

Supporting our employees is an integral component of our crisis management throughout all phases of the crisis. For example, we offer online training and coaching. We have also established a global hotline for our employees, allowing them to ask questions at any time of day and obtain assistance with whatever professional or personal problems they may have.

One particular focal point is the provision of guidelines and tools aimed at helping employees to achieve a healthy balance between their work, childcare, and family obligations and supporting employees who are at a particularly high health risk.

One thing has become particularly clear to us in the months since the crisis began: Flexible working models and virtual cooperation are more important than ever before. In many countries, we were fortunate in that we were able to fall back on proven flexible working models like Mywork at Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, and digital work tools.

We have established a special working group to address the experiences gained from the Covid-19 pandemic. Its aim is to establish what lessons can be learned from the pandemic and how they can be applied to the potential workplace of tomorrow. The working group has identified three focus areas:

• Flexible working models: We want to create even more flexible working models that enable employees to work flexible hours in the office, in their workplace, at home, or elsewhere – whatever the nature of their work. We will also make increased use of part-time work and job sharing in order to provide employees with flexible alternatives to full-time work. Another special feature will be the creation of location-independent roles, allowing us to recruit talented employees who meet the respective job requirements regardless of where in the world they may live.
• Investments in new technologies: We want to make even greater use of innovative technologies like artificial intelligence in order to advance the way in which our employees work.
• Leadership development: We want to provide our leaders with the skills they need to manage their employees successfully in a new world of work and make the right decisions.

Fostering work-life balance

We know that people’s priorities in life can change. The Covid-19 pandemic has provided a vivid demonstration of how important it is to achieve a healthy balance between work, childcare, and family obligations. We take this into account by offering flexible working time/location models, working time accounts for early retirement, and the possibility of taking an extended break from work, among other things. We also place great emphasis on family life. Here our commitment ranges from parental leave to childcare as well as support of employees caring for a relative.

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, our employees had the choice between different flexible working models. Thanks to the consistently positive experiences in terms of performance and commitment during the pandemic, we decided to roll out our proven Mywork at Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, program at all of our locations worldwide. The program allows employees to freely choose their working hours and location (in the same country) in agreement with their teams and supervisors. Employees agree with their direct supervisors on when and how often all team members are required to be in the office. Time tracking and time control are no longer required. The model reinforces our company’s performance culture and culture of trust and forms part of our global Future Ways of Working program. Workplace suitability permitting, the model can be taken up both by employees formally covered by collective agreements and employees exempt from them. Implementation will be complete by the end of 2021.

By offering information, advice, and assistance in finding childcare and nursing care as well as home and garden services, we help employees to reconcile the demands of their professional and personal lives. At various sites, employees benefit from childcare options that we subsidize. As an example, our headquarters in Darmstadt has featured a daycare center offering 150 slots in crèche, kindergarten, and after-school care for more than 50 years now. The Parents at Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, program makes it easier for our employees to return to work following parental leave by giving mothers and fathers on parental leave the chance to talk and interact, as well as helping them to keep in touch with the company. Moreover, they can make use of our various training and networking opportunities. We have also established similar programs in other locations.

A constant focus on health and safety

The health and safety of our employees constitute an important part of our daily responsibilities – especially in times of new challenges like the Covid-19 pandemic. We do everything to protect our employees against accidents and work-related illnesses, including in the areas of stress prevention, nutrition, and exercise. We employ preventive measures that can be easily incorporated into the daily work routine. They are designed to help our employees to avoid health problems.

As part of our response to the Covid-19 pandemic, we established global and local working groups to develop risk scenarios and plans of action. We built up internal coronavirus testing capacities, developed and implemented work safety standards, ensured the procurement of protective equipment, and made employees fully aware of the need to maintain social distancing and wear a face covering.

At our Darmstadt and Gernsheim sites, our Health Management unit conducts an array of campaigns and programs to promote the health of our workforce. Our employees have access to a health catalog detailing our Health Management services in both English and German. Among other things, this contains information on ergonomics, nutrition, stress, and mental health issues.

Workplace safety and health protection are the highest priority at Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany. It is especially important to us to do everything we can to prevent workplace-related illnesses and accidents. We apply the lost time injury rate (LTIR), which describes the number of accidents worldwide resulting in lost time of one day or more per million working hours, as a key indicator in measuring the success of our occupational safety measures. We calculate the LTIR for our employees as well as for temporary staff. Our previous target was to reduce the LTIR to 1.5 (accidents resulting in lost time of one day or more per million working hours) by 2020. The LTIR in 2020 was 1.3. We are currently developing a new target for the period beyond 2020.

Experience shows that most workplace accidents can be prevented by proper conduct. Through our BeSafe! safety culture initiative, we are working to educate our employees on dangers in the workplace and provide them with rules of conduct that help keep them safe. Uniform standards as well as local modules to meet specific safety requirements at individual sites can help achieve a steady improvement in the current situation. The program focuses on engaging managers in the safety culture and building their buy-in, aiming to make safety an intrinsic value and empower our employees to take responsibility for their own safety. The Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting restrictions meant it was not possible to conduct as many awareness campaigns in 2020. We are also working hard on the next phase of the safety culture initiative. Its new name, TeamSafe, reflects the fact that all employees bear collective responsibility for safety. In the next phase, the initiative will focus on enthusiasm, empowerment, and a role model function in the area of occupational health and safety.

^* The contents of this chapter or section are voluntary and therefore not audited. However, our auditor has read the text critically.