Disclosure 103-1: Explanation of the material topic and its Boundary
With more than 20,000 employees worldwide, Sika sees training and education as crucial for qualifying, retaining, and grooming the capabilities of its workforce. The company has a large proportion of longtime associates and is aware that it needs to keep these colleagues in particular up to date regarding their relevant knowledge and capabilities.

Disclosure 103-2: The management approach and its components
Sika’s management ensures that employees receive adequate training. The management approach for training and education within Sika includes the following components:

COMMITMENT
With a cooperative management style, and diverse development and continued training activities, Sika promotes the individual skills and initiative of its employees and encourages their entrepreneurial engagement, to keep up with the company’s dynamic development. Sika recognizes, monitors, and continuously improves the performance ability of its employees.

GOALS AND TARGETS
Sika has no explicit target regarding training and education but strives to offer every Sika employee at least 10 hours of training each year, and managers a fully-fledged training seminar.

RESPONSIBILITIES
The responsibility for training and education lies with line management, following the principles of Corporate Human Resources and the Human Resource manuals.

SPECIFIC ACTIONS

  • Management Development: Sika’s performance and talent management system has been the mainstay of management development activities for many years. Designed to identify and develop managers’ skills, it facilitates systematic employee succession planning in the respective organizations, while promoting company growth by continually pinpointing new talent. Potential managers are developed at different levels, either through continuous training initiated by the respective national organization or provided by the Sika Business School.
  • Sika Business School: The Sika Business School provides global, hands-on courses in the areas of management and talent development as well as marketing and sales. Regional Sustainability Academies have the objective to train employees from local subsidiaries to become sustainability experts, therefore enabling them to drive and accelerate the implementation of the “More Value – Less Impact” strategy at a regional and local level. In the year under review, Sika organisations of the regions were initiating, managing and coordinating local sustainability activities and projects which have been planned in the Regional Sustainability Academy Programs 2017 and 2018. The Sustainability Academy will be repeated in the future and is set to become an integral part of the Sika Business School’s training program. The goal is to initiate even more ­activities in the area of sustainability and achieve further progress.
  • Curricula include project assignments reflecting current everyday business situations. Members of Group Management and other line managers are involved in development activities to ensure that training remains relevant to practical needs. Product and application-based knowledge is delivered by academies whose course content and organization are defined by target market managers. With the focus on practical applications for Sika products, these training programs promote customer advisory skills.
  • Training Programs: Training activities for each Sika employee are determined based on the evaluation by the line manager. Each employee should attend at least one training course per year (internal or external). All non-management functions are evaluated and managed by their line managers and Human Resources for training and development needs.

Disclosure 103-3: Evaluation of the management approach
Sika evaluates its management approach through:

  • Monitoring: Sika monitors its performance regarding occupational health and safety on a regular basis. Internal reports are sent quarterly to the Environment, Health, Safety & Sustainability department where results are followed up and management approaches adapted accordingly.

Furthermore, Sika monitors and evaluates the effectiveness of its management approach according to target achievement.