HEINEKEN DEI Strategy
Our Global DEI strategy has 3 main pillars, focusing on our leaders, our people and our processes:
1. We accelerate DEI by starting with courageous leadership: Our leaders uncage their courage to develop themselves and develop their teams to be inclusive, and take responsibility to drive the actions and progress on DEI in their respective organizations.
2. We all contribute to fostering an inclusive environment: we share our views through regular inclusive dialogues that inform our ongoing priorities. We focus on fostering a safe and inclusive culture, creating psychological safety for all, and we build learning and development around inclusion that nurture personal growth.
3. We create equal opportunity in all the moments that matter: we embed Equal Opportunity in our ways of working, ensuring it’s at the center of how we experience working at HEINEKEN. We adopt inclusive policies and tools that are progressive and reflective of how we do business in our markets, and we stand by our Brewing a Better World commitments on gender balance, cultural diversity and equality.
Our Brewing a Better World DEI ambitions are:
We cascade our DEI commitments in every region and global functions, and we ensure ownership from the top and accountability from all our leaders. We track and measure progress on a quarterly basis through our global DEI dashboard. We have been externally recognised by Bloomberg Gender Equality Index as one of the more inclusive companies and as Diversity Champion in the LinkedIn Talent Awards.
Women in Sales
The "Women in Sales" initiative by HEINEKEN aims to level the playing field and increase the gender balance in the sales function. The Sales function, especially in the alcohol industry, has predominantly been a space populated with more males than females. The goal of Women in Sales is to make a positive impact within the Sales function through efforts put towards attraction, retention, development of women in the function and the facilitation of an inclusive workplace.
Recognizing that sales is a very relevant function in our current general manager pool, this initiative is also expected to contribute to the widening of our female talent pool for the General Manger position.
How it started
This initiative started in 2020, with some initial diagnostic actions to understand the challenges and barriers faced by women, conducting extensive internal research that included surveys and focus groups. This helped to uncover several biases and misunderstandings with regards to a woman thriving in sales roles.
What we’ve done:
• In 2022 we updated the initiative with a global webcast and provided operating companies with a toolkit with communication assets & guides to enable their efforts.
• Every HEINEKEN operating company is committed to increasing its female salesforce by 2025, and we regularly monitor its progress. Action plans focusing on attraction, retention, development, and inclusivity are in place, supplemented by global communication campaigns and recognition programs.
• At a global level, there is a robust communication plan which engages the Sales population regularly and provides a platform to address the challenges faced by women in sales as well as facilitates a cross pollination of ideas across the world. We also award and recognize OpCo actions with a dedicated award for Women in Sales at Commerce Week – an annual gathering of all the commerce employees at HEINEKEN.
• There is a global project manager for the initiative and an internal working team.
• The Regional Sales Directors raise this as a topic with their Sales Directors on a quarterly basis to view the numbers and discuss actions.
• This is also a topic that is discussed regularly by the Global Commerce Talent Committee - a body of leaders who oversee talent management of senior sales leaders and make decisions on senior sales vacancies in HEINEKEN. This committee ensures there is one female candidate in the shortlist of candidates assessed for every senior sales vacancy, even if it means that we need to look at external talents. All interviews also take place with a gender diverse panel of interviewers to avoid biases.
The sales team at HEINEKEN employs 30,000 people, 21% of whom are women. We have an ambition to have 25% of sales senior managers be female by 2025. When we started the initiative, we had 9% female senior managers in sales, each year we have been making progress and at the end of 2022 it grew to 19%.
Another metric that we look at is the Inclusion Index of our annual Climate Survey – a set of questions that indicate how included employees feel in the organization. The Inclusion Index for the Women in Sales population was 79 in 2021 and grew to 82 in 2022.
Local examples of implementation:
While led globally, the initiative is implemented locally according to the reality of each operating company – which sometimes requires revisiting the status quo.
• In Brazil, roles in sales previously required a motorcycle licence but only 15% of women who drive have a motorcycle licence. We adapted our processes to include using a car which increased the number of female hires.
• In Cambodia, the number of women in middle management sales positions went up from 9% to 32% between 2019 and 2022. The drivers included implementing an inclusive parental policy, equal opportunity via standardised recruitment processes and a flexible work policy.
Our Global DEI strategy has 3 main pillars, focusing on our leaders, our people and our processes:
1. We accelerate DEI by starting with courageous leadership: Our leaders uncage their courage to develop themselves and develop their teams to be inclusive, and take responsibility to drive the actions and progress on DEI in their respective organizations.
2. We all contribute to fostering an inclusive environment: we share our views through regular inclusive dialogues that inform our ongoing priorities. We focus on fostering a safe and inclusive culture, creating psychological safety for all, and we build learning and development around inclusion that nurture personal growth.
3. We create equal opportunity in all the moments that matter: we embed Equal Opportunity in our ways of working, ensuring it’s at the center of how we experience working at HEINEKEN. We adopt inclusive policies and tools that are progressive and reflective of how we do business in our markets, and we stand by our Brewing a Better World commitments on gender balance, cultural diversity and equality.
Our Brewing a Better World DEI ambitions are:
- Gender balance across senior management: 30% women by 2025, 40% by 2030
- Cultural diversity: at least 65% of country leadership teams are regional nationals across each region by 2023
- 100% of our managers trained in inclusive leadership by 2023
- Equal pay for equal work: assessments and action plan in place by 2023
We cascade our DEI commitments in every region and global functions, and we ensure ownership from the top and accountability from all our leaders. We track and measure progress on a quarterly basis through our global DEI dashboard. We have been externally recognised by Bloomberg Gender Equality Index as one of the more inclusive companies and as Diversity Champion in the LinkedIn Talent Awards.
Women in Sales
The "Women in Sales" initiative by HEINEKEN aims to level the playing field and increase the gender balance in the sales function. The Sales function, especially in the alcohol industry, has predominantly been a space populated with more males than females. The goal of Women in Sales is to make a positive impact within the Sales function through efforts put towards attraction, retention, development of women in the function and the facilitation of an inclusive workplace.
Recognizing that sales is a very relevant function in our current general manager pool, this initiative is also expected to contribute to the widening of our female talent pool for the General Manger position.
How it started
This initiative started in 2020, with some initial diagnostic actions to understand the challenges and barriers faced by women, conducting extensive internal research that included surveys and focus groups. This helped to uncover several biases and misunderstandings with regards to a woman thriving in sales roles.
What we’ve done:
• In 2022 we updated the initiative with a global webcast and provided operating companies with a toolkit with communication assets & guides to enable their efforts.
• Every HEINEKEN operating company is committed to increasing its female salesforce by 2025, and we regularly monitor its progress. Action plans focusing on attraction, retention, development, and inclusivity are in place, supplemented by global communication campaigns and recognition programs.
• At a global level, there is a robust communication plan which engages the Sales population regularly and provides a platform to address the challenges faced by women in sales as well as facilitates a cross pollination of ideas across the world. We also award and recognize OpCo actions with a dedicated award for Women in Sales at Commerce Week – an annual gathering of all the commerce employees at HEINEKEN.
• There is a global project manager for the initiative and an internal working team.
• The Regional Sales Directors raise this as a topic with their Sales Directors on a quarterly basis to view the numbers and discuss actions.
• This is also a topic that is discussed regularly by the Global Commerce Talent Committee - a body of leaders who oversee talent management of senior sales leaders and make decisions on senior sales vacancies in HEINEKEN. This committee ensures there is one female candidate in the shortlist of candidates assessed for every senior sales vacancy, even if it means that we need to look at external talents. All interviews also take place with a gender diverse panel of interviewers to avoid biases.
The sales team at HEINEKEN employs 30,000 people, 21% of whom are women. We have an ambition to have 25% of sales senior managers be female by 2025. When we started the initiative, we had 9% female senior managers in sales, each year we have been making progress and at the end of 2022 it grew to 19%.
Another metric that we look at is the Inclusion Index of our annual Climate Survey – a set of questions that indicate how included employees feel in the organization. The Inclusion Index for the Women in Sales population was 79 in 2021 and grew to 82 in 2022.
Local examples of implementation:
While led globally, the initiative is implemented locally according to the reality of each operating company – which sometimes requires revisiting the status quo.
• In Brazil, roles in sales previously required a motorcycle licence but only 15% of women who drive have a motorcycle licence. We adapted our processes to include using a car which increased the number of female hires.
• In Cambodia, the number of women in middle management sales positions went up from 9% to 32% between 2019 and 2022. The drivers included implementing an inclusive parental policy, equal opportunity via standardised recruitment processes and a flexible work policy.