Embracing diversity is critical to growing our business and building world-class teams.
At Zalando, we want to empower people to express themselves, from our own employees to our customers and partners. We aim to actively contribute to a world where everyone feels included and valued. That’s why we are dedicated to fostering an inclusive company culture that welcomes different perspectives and connects people with various backgrounds. We are proud that people from more than 140 different countries choose to work at Zalando.
Our commitment to diversity and inclusion serves us in many ways. It helps us hire and retain more diverse talent which reflects our broad customer base. It supports the creation of fresh ideas and reduces blindspots so that we can deliver excellent service and products to all of our customers across Europe. It further helps us to engage in a dialogue with our partners and the entire industry so that we can learn from each other and drive positive change together. Here are just some of the ways in which we at Zalando are promoting diversity and inclusion, and putting it at the core of everything that we do.
In 2021 we launched our company-wide D&I do.BETTER strategy, including new diversity targets for our leadership. We aim for a balanced representation of women and men on our top five management levels, including the Management Board, by the end of 2023. This target is defined as a 40-60% corridor where Zalando strives for women and men to reach a representation between 40 and 60 percent on each level. We transparently report on our progress in our annual Diversity & Inclusion Report and are proud of having achieved an average of 37.5% of top-five leadership level roles occupied by women in 2022. We are on the right path to achieving our target for women in leadership.
Our internal mentoring program promotes the development of women in management positions. We have established measures to ensure that the application and promotion processes are free of biases that favor one specific gender.
We recognize diversity in tech teams as a particularly important challenge. In 2022, women made up 24.8% of the tech workforce at Zalando, which is in line with the average share of women in tech roles in Germany. For our company, this means that more men are building our tech products, which are primarily used by women. To tackle this imbalance, we aim to increase the share of women in our tech teams to *40-60% by 2023. We are investing in dedicated initiatives, such as a Women in Tech Reskilling program and collaborative partnerships with external organizations.
November 2022 marked the release date of Zalando’s third do.BETTER Diversity & Inclusion Report. It’s our intention to provide transparency and insight into the state of diversity and inclusion within the company and the progress we’re making by regularly publishing a report. We are actively growing our dedicated D&I team to expand our D&I strategy and accelerate our efforts across the company.
A family-friendly work environment is important to keep our employees happy and healthy. At Zalando, we are constantly working on improving our support for parents. The COVID-19 pandemic has made adhering to regular working hours even more challenging for caregivers. Thus, we have increased flexibility regarding our working hours and developed additional support measures. Zalando grants three fully paid child sick days per parent per calendar year. We further offer counseling services with external partners, and personal consulting with our Family Friendliness Team.
Our employees are drivers of many projects around diversity, equity and inclusion within the company. One example is our annual Pride Month activation campaign, including the temporary pride rainbow redesign of the Zalando logo, organized by Zalando’s LGBTQI+ community and the Diversity Guild. Zalando’s Diversity Guild was formed in 2015 as a grassroots initiative and our first employee-led community of support for members of minority groups at Zalando. We formally rolled out our employee resource group (ERG) program in 2019 to support more communities organized around shared identity or experience at Zalando. ERGs create safe spaces where colleagues can feel like they belong, foster awareness and support, and amplify employee voices to inform leadership about the needs of their communities. We currently have eleven ERGs.
Everyone has unconscious biases and blind spots. To uncover and reduce them, and become more understanding and aware of each other’s identity, experience, and reality, we offer unconscious bias training. In this, we focus on developing awareness of how our individual experiences shape the ways we think and see the world. Through dedicated learning modules, Zalandos can drill down into the essence of bias and see how it plays out in work scenarios. We work with internal trainers as well as external facilitators and organizations to offer workshops, training and resources. The courses are offered online and face-to-face and will become mandatory for all employees in 2023.
In January 2020, Zalando joined The Valuable 500, a global group of businesses committed to addressing disability inclusion. Over the past year, we have recruited experts to provide more case management support for Zalandos with disabilities and to expand our workplace initiatives. Through our “Healthy Workplace” program, we have invested in accessibility to our office spaces, for example, by installing more automated doors and accessible restrooms at our new offices in Berlin. We are in the process of developing dedicated resources for leaders to ensure that they have the knowledge they need to effectively uphold our commitment to disability inclusion. Looking toward the future, Zalando will continue to challenge itself to improve its diversity, aiming to foster a fashion ecosystem that welcomes everyone.
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Please note that while we have attempted to include all important diversity and inclusion dates in this calendar, we do not claim completeness and regret if an important date has escaped our attention. We appreciate any feedback or comments that contribute to completeness. Thank you for your understanding.
Let’s continue to recognize and celebrate diversity and inclusion throughout the year and work towards creating an inclusive environment for all.
