Member KION Group

Every day, we do our best to understand our customers’ needs and provide them exactly what they need. We can only achieve this by attracting the best young talent and integrating a wide range of perspectives and skills. With two female members and four nationalities, the five-member KION Executive Board is the perfect example of how inspiring diversity can be. We want this level of diversity to become the norm for KION’s workforce: Professionals with all types of backgrounds, qualities and experiences coming together to explore new possibilities and benefiting from the broader views they can provide.

KION has taken important steps toward greater diversity, but we are still at the beginning of our journey. It is why we are looking forward to a stimulating dialogue with the members of the “Chefsache” initiative. We plan to use their valuable input to increase awareness – both internally and externally – of diversity in all its forms and to continue developing the KION Group into an organization where equal opportunity is the norm.

“Part of our operating model for the future is intensive, agile dialog with our employees worldwide. We are already relying heavily on feedback from the entire Group: for example, at the end of 2021 we conducted an extensive survey of our almost 40,000 employees as part of ‘KION Pulse’. The results have been incorporated into our leadership and team culture and have shown us concrete opportunities. Contemporary leadership means intensive, agile communication and a culture that invites new ideas and innovations.”

Framework / milestones

We have embedded diversity in our corporate culture to ensure that we not only promote its principles, but also live by them every day:
– Our shared KION Group value, ‘Courage’, reflects the goal that all employees recognize the need to actively promote diversity and create room for it in our corporate culture: “We shape change and innovation. We promote new ideas. We appreciate diversity and a wide range of opinions.”
– We also place responsibility for diversity on our managers. The leadership principles and core competencies we jointly developed in 2017 are clear: “The manager promotes respect for different cultures, mentalities and attitudes and fosters diversity in his / her team; he / she manages stakeholders proactively and integrates their views.”
– We have integrated the values, leadership principles and core competencies into several HR tools to be embraced across the company. They are a firm fixture of our annual employee dialogs, are taken into account in recruitment and are integrated into our KION-wide corporate leadership development programs.
– We have also launched a Group-wide project that defines specific measures, such as a female mentoring program, and we have been implementing them in stages since 2018.

Selected measures

– Leadership Development: Diversity is the responsibility of the board at KION. With two women and four nationalities on the Executive Board, KION leads the way in terms of diversity at senior management level. Such a diverse team brings a wide range of opinions and approaches to the table, which gives the KION Group a vital competitive edge. We apply the same principle when it comes to selecting candidates for our corporate development programs, which allows us to foster mutual understanding across geographical, cultural and functional boundaries while establishing a global network.
– Female Mentoring Program: We have taken a further step toward a more diverse management team with the introduction of a Female Mentoring Program in January 2019. It is designed to support the development of women whom we have identified as high performers and as having high potential, and bind them to the company for the long term. The fact that we assign the mentees to an experienced
executive underlines the value we place on the program, which enters its second round in summer 2019.
– Women’s Networks: Across the company, local women’s networks have been established to strengthen the collaboration, dialogue, and team spirit among female colleagues.

More about the company
https://www.kiongroup.com/en/