LISTEN UP: PUTTING EMPLOYEES AT THE CENTER FOR DESIGNING NEW WAYS OF WORK

turning crisis into opportunity

As for many other companies, the COVID-19 pandemic turned work life at Syngenta upside down. From one day to the next, all our office-based employees in our headquarters in Basel needed to work from home. While we were well equipped to handle the situation from an IT perspective, we quickly found out that there was much more to this than replacing face-to-face communication with virtual interaction. We needed to establish a new concept for virtual and flexible work, supported by a strong commitment for inclusion and a well-being program tailored to our employees’ needs. This support system would not only help us to ensure our business continuity and productivity, but also to keep spirits up during a time when many people felt mentally and physically stressed. We wanted to break down both the physical and psychological barriers to be a more inclusive and collaborative Syngenta.

“future of work” designed by our employees

At the core of this effort is our new global engagement program called “Future of Work.” The pandemic provided an opportunity to work differently – with increased flexibility and new ways of collaborating across teams and with customers. The Future of Work program aims to create a working environment and culture that is customer-focused and where innovation thrives, fosters collaboration, and enables us to attract and retain the best people. For colleagues in Basel, this has enabled a focus on flexible working – enabling employees the flexibility to decide when they want to work from home or the office. It was important to make employees the center of the process to truly understand their individual circumstances and preferences.

Traditionally, women have been taking on the bulk of parenting and caring roles, regardless of whether they work full-time or part-time. And while flexible work won’t change this overnight, it can be an important tool to advance gender equality. It has the potential to empower women in their career choices and create a better balance when it comes to sharing responsibilities. We therefore believe that having the choice of flexible work will benefit both women and men in the long run.

ask questions on employee’s needs – don’t assume the answers

Basel as global headquarters of Syngenta Group and Syngenta Crop Protection with more than 1’100 employees is one of our pilot sites for the Future of Work program. Through surveys, we received the feedback that most people in Basel would prefer to continue working in a hybrid model (2-3 days a week from home and the office, respectively) after COVID-19 restrictions ease. Major pull factors to come back to the office are the direct interaction with colleagues and the better co-creation opportunities for project design.
 
Based on this encouraging feedback and our employees’ strong sense of responsibility and dedication during these challenging times, we decided to move forward taking the best feature with us: the flexibility. In addition to developing a local Flexible Workplace policy, we are working on a pilot for a new office floor layout (with half our employees indicating that they do not require a dedicated desk), where we offer more opportunity for collaboration and co-creation across cross-functional teams.

truly flexible working arrangements

Our Basel employees can decide individually in alignment with their line manager where and when they want to work. As far as legislation permits, we have removed any restrictions: Employees may choose how many days a week they come on site, provided their roles and tasks allow for it.

We have supported our multi-national employees who due to the COVID-19 restrictions often felt isolated and cut off from their families. They have been able to return to their home country to work on local contractual conditions where their role allowed for this transition.

increased inclusion through our employee assistance program

Our new Flexible Workplace policy has received very positive feedback, yet we know that it is only one variable in the equation if we want to support employees to balance their personal and professional life and feel trusted and motivated through what will still be a difficult year. We have therefore been offering several engagement activities in Basel since spring 2020, including monthly webinars around the Future of Work program and the opportunities we offer to interact while being “closed off” at home.
 
Other offers in the area of wellbeing and mental health include our Employee Assistance Program which operates 24/7 and is completely confidential. It’s designed for our employees who need help and want to talk to someone in confidence and is available to all Syngenta employees and our families.

We have also recently trained and communicated to all staff, twenty Basel employees as new Mental Health First Aiders.

a diverse offering for diverse needs on physical and mental health

• Daily Burn App: 416 users at the end of July; completing a total of 3289 workouts between them

• Resilience training series: 12 sold-out webinars (90-100 participants per session); attendance was almost 70% of registrations (50% for manager sessions)
• “Healthy cooking while working from home”: 3 fully booked sessions
• Home Office furniture at a discount: Office chairs and height adjustable desks at preferred rates for HSE-compliant home office setup
• Digital wellbeing: Roll-out of Cortana and myAnalytics
• Psychological safety in teams: 2 solutions on team development piloted in May

expansion of flexible working to swiss production sites

We hope that our pilot in Basel will show that our inclusive approach to flexibility in the workplace and the supporting elements we put in place can help employees to feel safe, more productive and well-connected, even when working from remote locations such as their home office. We strongly believe that this approach will help us to better acknowledge our employees’ individual lives outside of work and make them feel more seen and heard with regard to their respective situation. It gives them more choices when it comes to their individual responsibilities, for example to fit work around caretaking duties. If the pilot is well received, we plan to build on it, developing flexibility concepts for other Syngenta sites in Switzerland, where we have different job profiles, such as lab technicians and production operators. Our journey has just begun…

Our Future of Work team would be delighted to exchange with other Advance member companies on how to build an inclusive workplace. Please reach out to: Elisabeth Vock at Elisabeth.vock@syngenta.com.

For more information on Syngenta’s Diversity & Inclusion focus go here:
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