Employee Empowerment: The Heart of our Business
At CEMEX, our people are at the core of our business and our success. With the contributions, energy, and vision of our employees we continue to build our future and to be highly competitive in the building materials industry. Therefore, we have an ongoing interest in continuing to improve our work environment and to be surrounded by engaged employees who lead our company through a high-performance and sustainable culture.
In addition to our goal to be a company of choice, and for whom employees are proud to work, we aim to nurture and empower our employees by providing safe and healthy working environments as well as interesting, challenging, and continuous development opportunities. We do our best to make CEMEX not only a successful business but also a great place to work.
Governance and management
To ensure that we attract and have the best talent in the right role at the right time, we:
- design organizational structures that maximize effectiveness and efficiency and help employees reach their potential
- ensure consistency in our talent processes through global policies, guidelines, and services
- develop our people so they can execute our strategy, grow individually, and contribute to the constant reinvention of our business
- provide the right incentives and rewards schemes that recognize performance and motivate our people to continuously exceed their performance targets
Our people management approach drives our efforts to develop organizational structures that maximize effectiveness and efficiency and help employees reach their potential. We seek to develop leaders that have a vision, aspirations, and values that align with those of our company, a deep understanding and belief in our mission, and the knowledge and skills to keep us competitive.
Our global policies, guidelines, and services are designed to assist our local business units in finding the right people and to ensure consistency in structures and employment criteria throughout the organization. Through organizational design and by establishing organization and incentive structures that drive sustainable high performance, we develop our people so that they can execute our strategy, grow individually, and contribute to the constant reinvention of our business.
We provide attractive reward packages that recognize performance and motivate our people to continuously exceed their performance targets. Among the incentives and benefits that we provide is a stock-ownership plan for executives, which seeks to better align their interests with those of our stockholders by awarding long-term restricted stock, life insurance, scholarships, bonuses, grocery allowances, uniforms, overtime pay, and savings accounts. These benefits vary among our different sites and business units.
Ensuring a fair and diverse workplace
At CEMEX, we strive to build a workforce that is rich in diversity and that reflects the local population in the areas in which we operate. We believe that a variety of minds working together—spurring new ways of thinking and unique perspectives—enriches our working teams and allows us to significantly increase our competitiveness by better serving our customers.
We are dedicated to ensuring we have an ethical workplace. Therefore, we assess employees' perceptions through surveys and annually deliver a campaign to promote ethical and expected professional behaviors. In addition, we work to uphold the principles of the United Nations Global Compact, a voluntary standard that covers human rights and labor standards. A diverse workforce brings with it new ways of thinking, unique perspectives, and valuable ideas, all of which contribute to our culture at CEMEX. Providing a safe, positive, and ethical work environment allows individuals to do their best and promotes a high-performance culture.
We guarantee the right to freedom of association and collective bargaining in all of our operations. We comply with local employment laws regarding minimum notice periods for any operational changes that affect employees' jobs or working agreements.
Employee Engagement
Employee engagement is a critical component of our business strategy and performance. By engaging with our employees we build trust and create a working environment in which employees know their contribution is valued. Engaged people want to continue to be a part of the company, to go above and beyond to satisfy customers and achieve performance targets. As a consequence, they deliver better business results.
At CEMEX, we engage our employees on topics ranging from ethics to innovation to operations in order to earn their trust, foster the exchange of ideas, and improve our performance. In addition, we continually focus on improving our work environment. To effectively target our efforts, we conduct our CEMEX survey worldwide.
Because CEMEX is a global and diverse company, our engagement efforts are vital to increasing our understanding of sustainability challenges and opportunities within our business, and we use these insights in our ongoing effort to be an employer of choice.
Our CEMEX Survey provides a forum for employees to share their opinions, and its results give us a representative view of what matters the most to our people. Our goal is to achieve high engagement levels in each country in which we operate, compared with industry benchmarks. In addition to our internal employee survey, our employees share their ideas and perceptions through regular "town-hall" style meetings and ongoing team briefings. More importantly, this feedback guides our actions to continuously improve our workplace.
As part of the ongoing efforts to support our employees, we have in place arrangements that allow them to balance work with other commitments, and we encourage employee volunteering opportunities.
Employee Survey
At CEMEX, we want to be the world's most efficient and profitable building materials company. While we know we have a solid business strategy, the ultimate determinant of our company's success is our people. As such, their opinions on a range of issues, from their individual likes and dislikes to the direction of our company as a whole, are important to our ability to achieve our business goals.
Since 2006, we have conducted our CEMEX employee survey globally. The survey measures the degree to which employees feel motivated by their job, supervisors, team, and organization to stay with the company and contribute to its success. Guided by the results, segmented by business unit and functional areas, our business leaders and department heads have developed action plans and implemented initiatives that improve the work life and performance of our employees.
Leadership Communications
The Leadership Communication Process has three main components:
- minimum core requirements for actively communicating with employees at each level within the organization to better inform and engage our people
- processes for timely communication of relevant strategic business topics
- mechanisms that ensure employees are given multiple opportunities to provide feedback or address questions to management, ensuring dynamic, two-way communications with our people
To equip all CEMEX managers to better manage communication, we have an online and easy-to-use tool kit that allows managers to review best practices, tools, and tips for communicating with employees.
Sustainability
We believe that from our headquarters to the front-lines, all employees can create sustainable value for the company regardless of their position. For our sustainability strategy to be effective, however, employees must understand how and why sustainability matters so that they can incorporate it into their daily activities. Towards these ends, we have developed a suite of internal communications materials to help managers and employees understand what sustainability means at CEMEX and their role in identifying and implementing plans for us become more sustainable both locally and globally.
Executives across business units and regions actively participated in the sustainability communications rollout by holding their teams accountable for completing team sustainability discussions, sending a clear message that sustainability is a process of continuous improvement and is vital to our business success.
Talent Development
At CEMEX, we promote a culture of consistent high performance worldwide. We know that, in order for our employees to perform, they need tools and opportunities to increase their productivity and help them develop new skills. We seek to develop employees so they can execute our strategy, grow individually, and contribute to the constant reinvention of our business.
In addition, we work hard to attract and retain talent and to place our employees in the right role at the right time. That includes making sure that our employees are compensated fairly and competitively for their efforts and that they receive ongoing training to remain competitive and effective.
Our commitment to employee development is multifaceted. From our global leadership and management programs to our scholarships and online training courses, we work to foster our employees' growth at each stage of their career. We also encourage our employees to take international assignments, which enhance the participant's growth, facilitate the exchange of best practices, and strengthen our shared corporate culture.
Talent Review
Talent Review is a dialogue-based employee development process, based on the employee's performance, potential, and personal interest. Performance and potential are assessed in consensus with the employee's direct supervisor and peers, as well as with the area leader.
The process opens a forum for discussions about our people, builds a common "language" to evaluate and identify talent, outlines talent gaps, and empowers the organization to actively participate in development.
Training
We provide continuous training and development opportunities so employees can work smartly, safely, and effectively. We seek to develop employees' skills using a variety of learning initiatives and on-the-job training on a wide variety of subjects. We have developed specific programs aimed at strengthening the skills and competencies of people in leadership positions and in building those same competencies in those rising to these levels. These programs give our future leaders the opportunity to learn about decision-making models, business trends, and strategy; strengthen interpersonal skills; build a strong international network that promotes knowledge and best-practice sharing; and experience working in virtual and multicultural teams.
To complement our onsite training efforts, we have developed a state-of-the-art online learning management system, CEMEX Learning, through which our employees are able to design their Individual Development Plans.
These plans guide each employee to deliver his or her best. One of the main purposes of CEMEX Learning is to serve as a course library. Our online courses include, among many others, subjects such as interpersonal skills, process and project management, our CO2 emissions challenge, our use of alternative components in products, our technology strategy, retaining talent, and situational leadership.
As part of our ETHOS ethics training initiative, we offer one-on-one and online courses to reinforce our culture, including such subjects as antitrust, avoiding conflicts of interest, code of ethics and business conduct, Sarbanes-Oxley, protecting confidential information, and workplace harassment. In addition, we have 30 ethics clips, mini-courses that exemplify and reinforce how we expect our employees to conduct themselves and abide by our code of ethics.