As a stakeholder group of Bionorica, its employees and their involvement are of major importance to the company. Despite major challenges resulting from the coronavirus pandemic, which have led to declines in sales and turnover, the Executive Board fulfilled its corporate and social responsibility by keeping the number of employees stable at about 1,800 worldwide in both 2020 and 2021.
Communication is especially important in times of change. For example, CEO Professor Michael A. Popp addressed employees in multilingual video messages in the 2021 reporting year and reported on the performance of the company and measures to combat the coronavirus. These two topics were of great interest to the employee stakeholder group in the 2021 reporting year. This is also reflected in the intranet tool “Questions to the Executive Board”, which gives Bionorica employees the opportunity to address questions on strategy and other topics to the Executive Board. This dialogue platform saw heavy use in 2021.
A milestone in worldwide employee involvement was reached in December of the 2021 reporting year with the introduction of a global, English-language intranet rolled out jointly by Corporate Communications and IT. The comment function under the news on the front page of the global intranet ensures a regular exchange on current Bionorica issues.
In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and the associated increased use of remote work, an important concern brought up by employees to the management was the creation of a digital learning service that users can access regardless of time or place. In response to this, “Bionorica Academy” was launched in mid-April 2021, a cutting-edge time- and location-independent learning platform for all employees of Bionorica SE across all divisions and countries. This gives our employees a transparent source of information about all of the company’s offers for internal and external qualification and further training and allows them to complete online training courses and track their personal learning progress. Bionorica puts targeted focus on the training and further education of all employees and thus on their qualification. This makes it possible for the company to recruit experts and managers from its own ranks.