Our own workforce

Together, we are a strong global network that values entrepreneurial spirit and rewards success. Our sustainable approach, and genuine respect for one another, are fundamental to grow and thrive. At HUBER+SUHNER, passionate people collaborate in diversified teams to provide connectivity and innovation to customers and society. This is how we help bring people closer together. Today and beyond.

Approach

HUBER+SUHNER continuously strives to be a great place to work, a place where people feel inspired and safe and can develop their potential. Our goal is to retain our talents and, at the same time, to attract new employees. This is based on an enticing employer value proposition (EVP) and a global employer branding programme. We offer a strong purpose, regular training and learning opportunities, and a truly diverse, inclusive, international, agile, and safe work environment.

In an environment where change has become a constant, teams must ensure that everyone is empowered to address challenges and look for opportunities together. Our leadership principles are a common guideline for all our employees, placing a high priority on both psychological safety and work in diverse teams. Learning together from mistakes and focusing on constructive feedback enables all employees to perform at their best.

On the following pages, we outline our objectives and our progress on:

• Agile mindset
• Attracting and retaining employees
• Training and continuous education
• Diversity, equality, and inclusion

Objectives

Agile mindset

Our world is in constant motion, and as an organisation, we must adapt to stay relevant and thrive. We acknowledge the need for stability in certain areas while embracing agility where it is essential for outside-in-perspectives, progress, and innovation. Our agile transformation initially focused on the realms of information technology (IT) and selected business units coordinated by the Agile Transformation core team. Adopting agile principles in IT projects yields substantial benefits and helps us to reduce complexity and minimise silo thinking.

We also addressed the aspect of learning and adopting. A culture of learning and constantly evolving is central to our commitment to quality. While agility encourages us to focus on the essentials, we must not lose sight of the importance of attention to detail where it matters.

Our intention is to foster agility across segments, technologies, and international teams, helping to connect the right experts. While we still see plenty of traditional waterfall approaches and top-down decisions, we envision a future where self-learning teams become the norm where applicable. Within five years, we aspire to leverage the advantages of autonomous teams, ensuring that they align with the bigger picture while contributing to our shared goals.

Attracting and retaining employees

The Human Resources department in Switzerland proposes programmes which can be adopted and adapted as needed by the various sites around the globe in response to country-specific needs. For many years, HUBER+SUHNER has offered the opportunity for employees with jobs in an office environment to work remotely. We continue to strive for a harmonious blend of remote and on-site work, harnessing the advantages of both options for the benefit of the company and its workforce where applicable. We remain committed to investing in an inspiring work environment that caters to flexible and secure work needs, enhancing productivity, and fostering collaboration with internal and external stakeholders.

We strive for long-term relations with employees right from the recruitment stage. The company is committed to selecting candidates who wish to grow and learn with the organisation. This is why HUBER+SUHNER offers specialised programmes and benefits to all but also tailored to employees aged 50 and above; our commitment to their ongoing development and well-being is evidence of our appreciation for their long-term contributions. HUBER+SUHNER is a cofounder of the focus50plus network in Switzerland, demonstrating our awareness of demographic change and how it may result in workforce shortages.

It is fundamental to keep employees healthy, motivated, and committed until they retire or even beyond. Offers such as health and safety services, flexible working and retirement arrangements, and training opportunities until the last day of work are highly valued by our mature employees as they stay professionally up to date and acquire new skills while preparing for or tranisitioning into retirement. This holistic approach underscores our dedication to nurturing durable relationships with our employees throughout their professional journeys.

Training and continuous education

The apprenticeship and trainee programmes are important offerings that attract the next generation of employees. At HUBER+SUHNER Switzerland, we offer nine different types of apprenticeships to help young people learn essential skills for their chosen vocations through practical and classroom learning.

Diversity, equality, and inclusion

People with different backgrounds and cultures bring different perspectives and additional know-how to our company. People with diverse viewpoints, and expertise enrich our working environment. This aspiration is also firmly anchored in trust, one of our five corporate values: “We treat everyone with respect and value diversity."

HUBER+SUHNER is convinced that our people with a variety of cultures from around the globe help us develop innovative products and better solutions for customers. As an attractive employer, HUBER+SUHNER promotes diversity, consistently advocates equal opportunities, and offers attractive and flexible workplaces for different work and life models.

Progress

Agile mindset

In 2023, we successfully integrated agile roles within our framework. This transformative shift introduced three key roles: facilitator, agile coach, and product owner.

The facilitator, acting as a catalyst for collaboration, ensures smooth communication and teamwork within the organisation. This role is crucial in removing obstacles and fostering an environment conducive to agile practices. Agile coaches, acting as guides and mentors, play key roles in facilitating the adoption of agile methodologies. Drawing upon extensive experience, these coaches provide invaluable insights, mentorship, and support to teams navigating the complexities of agile processes. The product owner assumes a pivotal role in aligning projects with organisational goals, ensuring that the end product meets stakeholders’ needs.

Embracing agility doesn't replace existing roles; rather, it enhances them. As we celebrate this achievement, we look forward to the positive impact these agile roles will have on our projects and, ultimately, our organisation's ability to navigate an ever-evolving business landscape with resilience and agility. Part of our transformation is also a data-driven mindset. This means incorporating data into our daily operations, nurturing a deep understanding of its potential, and making data-backed decisions at every level. To get there, we recruited more data analysts, data engineers, and data scientists.

Attracting and retaining employees

Again, we registered varied turnover rates across our regions, influenced by business performance and the given local frameworks. Therefore, we stuck to our designed local target figures for a stable workforce. The defined target range for countries like Germany or Switzerland ranges between 8 % and 12 %, whereas China can range between 35 % and 45 % to be within the target frame. In total 647 positions were filled in 2023; 433 of these with new hires. Overall, we are happy to report that we have maintained a turnover rate below our target range in several locations. The lowered turnover rate is indicative of our commitment to retaining and developing our employees.

Table 3: Employee turnover rate by country*

Despite the challenges faced in 2023, HUBER+SUHNER remained resilient as an employer. The company navigated a tough business environment especially in North America with declining rollouts in the 5G sector. When the decline in the Communication segment, linked to our global production network, was recognognised, proactive measures such as reducing business trips, forgoing international conferences, and revising budgets were implemented. Despite these efforts to adapt to the changed market conditions, job cuts to cope with the lower volumes became unavoidable, particularly in the United States, in Tunisia, Mexico, and Poland.

Training and continuous education

HUBER+SUHNER invests in individual training opportunities for its employees to ensure their professional development. In 2023, our training time for employees totalled 60,848 hours. This equals 14 hours of training per employee across all functions which is a slight decrease from 2022. We will work towards increasing these again in 2024 to the target of 16 hours, as defined previously.

Table 4: Overview of training hours and costs

Diversity, equality, and inclusion

In 2023, we introduced an inclusive language toolkit in the German-speaking region. We aim to facilitate the inclusion of all individuals through our language usage, expressing equality of opportunities and fairness at HUBER+SUHNER. Our language compass offers guidance for various cases, proposes solutions, links to reference materials, and also provides tips and tricks for using images to promote inclusion. Our recommendations are not solely focused on gender-neutral language; rather, they are intended to inspire reflection on how we use language and images.

In Switzerland, where close to 1,200 of our employees are based, HUBER+SUHNER offers many benefits that exceed legal requirements. These include continued salary payments in case of illness or accident and generous pension fund contributions. In addition, HUBER+SUHNER offers discounted lunches thanks to staff canteens, and special conditions for cultural activities. Employees with young children can choose certain nearby day-care centers, which are supported by the HUBER+SUHNER Foundation.

Table 5: Gender distribution*  

HUBER+SUHNER is convinced that diversity is a key success factor and that different perspectives are an enriching and creative source. This helps to develop innovative products and better solutions for customers. As an attractive employer, HUBER+SUHNER promotes diversity, consistently advocates equal opportunities, and offers attractive and flexible workplaces for different work and life models.

Planned actions

Complementing the leadership journey at HUBER+SUHNER

As part of our commitment to being an attractive employer, HUBER+SUHNER is set to introduce new training modules to all leaders worldwide. The “Leading Myself” module focuses on increasing behavioral awareness, leveraging impact as a leader, and improving personal effectiveness. The “Leading Teams” module aims to build teams and leaders effectively while empowering them for success. Our goals are clearly defined:

• Strengthen our ability to perform in a dynamic business environment
• Put leadership principles into practice and foster the leadership culture at HUBER+SUHNER
• Provide hands-on tools for line managers (vertical lead) and project managers (lateral lead)
• Maintain a lean and focused training framework
• Achieve impact through a local footprint and targeted trainings

These initiatives underscore our commitment to enhancing technical skills and nurturing personal and team-oriented capabilities, creating an inspiring work environment, and supporting employees in their professional development.

Feel the employee pulse

Our employees’ passion and ambition was also reflected in the 2022 employee survey conducted at all sites worldwide. The participation rate was remarkably high with 85 % and more than 3,600 employees took the opportunity to voice their opinions. To thrive in an ever-changing environment, the need to feel the employee pulse more frequently became obvious. HUBER+SUHNER will therefore increase the frequency of global employee surveys from every third year to every second year.

Move of our Taufkirchen office

The German location in Taufkirchen will move to Unterhaching in summer 2024. The new location in the greater Munich area is only a few hundert metres away. The move will also be used to introduce the shared desk and clean desk principles in the open office environment, which offers numerous meeting and retreat opportunities. Employees can look forward to a state-of-the-art working environment with a roof terrace, several meeting rooms and spacious and attractively designed employee kitchens to foster cross-functional collaboration.

Stories from around the globe

Anniversaries at various locations

Australia

At HUBER+SUHNER, we believe that celebrating successes is important for our team spirit. In Frenchs Forest, Australia, HUBER+SUHNER celebrated the 50th anniversary of the company's activities in August 2023. Half a century ago, HUBER+SUHNER expanded down under and opened its first fully owned and operated subsidiary in a small industrial unit in the Sydney area. We have both a factory and administration there and the site, which has been operating since 1973, is one of our oldest sites abroad.

Malaysia

One month later it was our Malaysia site’s turn to celebrate its 25th anniversary within the HUBER+SUHNER Group; we have been present in Malaysia since 1998. In Petaling Jaya, Selangor, around 80 colleagues make an impact every day – in the factory and in the office. The organisation is combined with our Singapore office to manage sales for Malaysia and Southeast Asia in general. The local team covers most applications, especially strong in the Industry segment, namely test and measurement, running a medium-size production for radio frequency (RF) products. Malaysia can be considered as our centre of competence for semi-rigid RF assemblies.

China

In March, customers, partners, suppliers, and employee representatives gathered at our Changzhou factory in China for the tenth anniversary themed “Connecting ‒ today and beyond.” As a symbolic act to acknowledge the positive development of the Changzhou factory and its future, CEO Urs Ryffel, local management, and other representatives attended the ceremony to ring in the next successful chapter for this site.

Team building at its best in India

HUBER+SUHNER India organised a lively team-building event with 150 employees at Ranthambore National Park in December 2023. The two-day trip included such activities as a jungle safari, a town hall meeting, cultural events, and team-building exercises. Our managing director in India acknowledged the 2023 achievements, addressed challenges and opportunities for 2024, and expressed gratitude for the team's dedication. With events like this, HUBER+SUHNER acknowledges the importance of a rich corporate culture and a strong team spirit.

New production facility in Switzerland

Celebrating new and established production locations In 2023, a state-of-the-art production environment with associated office workplaces and photovoltaic rooftop was created right on our doorstep in Pfäffikon ZH, Witzberg, Switzerland. The goal of the new two-storey building project was to concentrate the cable production. The new building is now home to multi-core and other cable production and has service bridges to the already existing buildings as well as 200 additional parking spaces. The investment in the new building is a clear commitment to Switzerland as a manufacturing base.

Best career management policy in Tunisia

HUBER+SUHNER Tunisia has proven its commitment to excellence by securing the national human resources (HR) prize for the “best career management policy” at the HR AWARDS Tunisia 2023. The award, organised by ARFORGHE and the Konrad Adenauer-Stiftung, marks the second consecutive win for HUBER+SUHNER Tunisia, showcasing our dedication to building an environment of professional growth and development. The recognition is a testament to the implementation of human resources practices with a focus on transparent communication, personalised career plans, extensive training opportunities, and an internal promotions and mobility programme.