Work-life-balance

ALTANA sees work-life balance as the sum of all measures designed to allow for a healthy and sustainable balance of career and private life in a dynamically changing working world in order to secure the life quality of our employees.

The compatibility of career and family is a central aspect of work-life balance. Family-friendly human resource policy is an important prerequisite for equal opportunities. To allow especially female professionals and executives options for professional (re)entry and career advancement, ALTANA offers flexible working hour models. However, women continue to choose part-time jobs in order to find a balance between their professional and private commitments. In late 2010, ALTANA had 355 part-time employees, of which 282 were women.

Of course, our flexible working hour models are also available to our male employees. In addition to conventional part-time models, we also offer our employees the option to take temporary contracts or to work partly from a home office. Although there are no official regulations yet, the HR department, supervisors, and employees typically work to find an agreeable individual solution. This offer is of course also available to mothers and fathers on parental leave. In some cases, we have combined this approach with job sharing models, in which two employees share one workplace and work partially from home. This allows utmost flexibility for both the employees and their supervisors. The offer has been well accepted, but no exact evaluation is available yet, since these cases are statistically recorded as part-time employment.

Furthermore, we offer daycare / crèche placement our employees at some sites within the scope of cooperating with local daycare centers. This makes it easier to balance career activities with individual lifestyle, different working hours, and family needs. Particularly employees who commute a long distance are glad to find daycare for their children in the immediate vicinity of the company.