Employee commitment is essential to ensure positive change for the company. By developing change management programs, Bel empowers each individual to pursue their professional development.
Our social model at glance
Bel is a human-scale company with nearly 10,800 employees on 30 production sites and 56 subsidiaries in 32 countries. Together we are building a new agri-food model, guided by our mission: “Providing healthier, more responsible food for all.”
Nurturing change
Launched in 2021, the Nurture program sets out Bel’s commitments to its employees, as well as the group’s strategic vision for its human resources challenges.
It also specifies the behaviors we expect, as well as the new management model we’re employing to achieve this goal. Built around the Group’s three core values – Dare, Care and Commit – Nurture expresses the fundamental values that Bel wishes to bring to its employees.
The commitments in this program are broken down into six themes:
- Improving individual recognition: by guaranteeing decent pay and a basic level of benefits for all Bel employees, and by valuing individual expertise and celebrating successes.
- Supporting families: by making several of the Group’s programs accessible to employees’ families.
- Promoting personal development: by assessing and developing employee skills, managing career paths, and encouraging internal mobility.
- Ensuring safety and well-being at work: by ensuring compliance with health and safety standards, and by improving quality of life at work and work-life balance.
- Increasing personal fulfillment: by emphasizing employment autonomy and empowerment, by allowing each of them to train and get involved in CSR projects, and by increasing employee satisfaction.
- Strengthening a sense of belonging: by leveraging our employer brand, employee shareholding, diversity, and employee inclusion.
Values, culture, and behavior
The Group’s cultural transformation is based on Bel’s three core historical values.
It is supported by We@Bel, a program that translates these values into new leadership behaviors, in line with changes in the Group’s markets and environment. We@Bel is first and foremost about helping people, through training for all employees and a program dedicated to managers.
Nurturing individual commitment
Bel is attentive to its employees and is building its cultural transformation based on three fundamentals: commitment, well-being, and individual fulfillment.
- Reaching out to employees: as part of “Nurture”, Bel launched the “Your Voice” employee engagement program in 2021. This program includes an internal engagement survey conducted each year among all employees.
- Working differently: the new Hybrid Work@Bel policy, signed in 2021, encourages employee autonomy and flexibility in the way we do work, thereby striking the right balance between the Group’s performance and the well-being of its employees.
- Inclusion and respect: for Bel, welcoming, respecting, and valuing all employees also means proactively fighting against all forms of discrimination and harassment and promoting diversity and inclusion. In 2022, the Group launched its Diversity & Inclusion Charter.
- Welcoming and support: onboarding and retaining talent is a priority for the Group. In 2022, Bel updated its onboarding program to better welcome and support new employees from the moment they sign their contract until the end of their first year with the company. The process is personalized according to the needs of each business unit and each employee’s country.
Committed employees today, activists tomorrow
Commitment is at the heart of Bel’s human resources policy, which encourages responsibility, enthusiasm, entrepreneurial spirit and skills development.
In this way, Bel encourages and supports the commitment of its employees.
- “Days for Good”: since May 2022 during solidarity week, Bel employees have had the opportunity to dedicate a few hours or days out of their working time to collectively take part in outreach missions within local associations or NGOs acting on three causes shared by the Group: access to food, help the most vulnerable children, environmental protection.
- In 2022, over 1,300 employees from 15 different countries took part in the first Days for Good event to the benefit of 25 associations.
- In 2023, the event achieved record-breaking participation levels among the workforce with over 2,000 volunteers from 22 countries and 37 different sites, including France with 330 employees from head office and 300 across the plants.
- Actors for Good program: launched in 2021, this program trains all of the company’s employees on climate change, particularly through Climate Fresk. These collaborative workshops, based on the IPCC reports, aim to raise awareness and develop individual or collective solutions. With more than 1,500 employees trained, the Group is one of the very first companies to have obtained the new “Climate Fresk” label.
- Expertise sponsorship: since 2020, Bel has been offering its employees in France the opportunity to take part in good causes and solidarity challenges on their personal or professional time. More than 300 hours of work have been devoted to these civic projects. This program will be extended to all employees worldwide in 2022. In late 2020, the Group joined the Alliance pour le Mécénat de Compétences, which promotes expertise sponsorship within companies, in France and internationally, in order to develop this practice together.
- Salary rounding: since 2016, Bel has participated in a salary rounding program, which allows employees in France to donate the pennies from their salaries to associations. Each donation is matched by the Bel Group. Nearly €35,000 have been raised to benefit charities chosen by the employees.
- Donating vacation days: in 2020, Bel gave its employees in France the opportunity to donate their vacation days and matched each of these donations, raising more than €100,000 for healthcare facilities located near our plants and headquarters, to support medical staff and help them acquire equipment and supplies.
- Supporting employee commitment through the Bel Foundation: each year, the Bel Foundation provides financial support to fifteen associations around the world that work to promote the well-being of children, which our employees have chosen to support. To learn more about this program, visit the Bel Foundation website.
Encouraging a sincere, constructive and transparent social dialogue
Our goal is to build relationships with our employees and employee representatives based on trust, a sincere, constructive and transparent dialogue, to ensure the development of each individual in a peaceful working environment.
Since 2016, we have implemented a Charter for Social Dialogue at the global level, which structures our approach around essential principles: compliance with legislation, open and informed dialogue with representative entities, but also with managers and employees.