Across our global network at Lonza, we are committed to creating an inclusive environment where people feel they belong and are empowered to bring their best. We have a broad range of cultural backgrounds across our global employee community and our workforce includes more than 100 different nationalities. Our employees are balanced across a broad range of age groups, and between genders with Lonza's global workforce being 37% women and 63% men in 2024.
Our people sit at the heart of our business, and we strive to give our colleagues the best possible professional experience within Lonza. In 2024, we prioritized our talent growth and development, alongside our hiring practices. We deployed Learn@Lonza, a modern, customizable digital solution to provide every employee with access to a voluntary, tailored learning experience that caters to diverse learning styles and needs. Alongside mandatory compliance and job-related training, this company-wide learning management system supports employees with easy access to resources necessary for skill enhancement and continuous growth.
We equipped our people managers with the Lonza Manager Learning Path, a series of targeted microlearning courses to upskill their leadership capabilities. We also expanded our accelerated development programs, aimed at developing our future leaders, with a second cohort of the Accelerated Management Development Program (AMDP) for global talent, and the Site Leadership Development Center (SLDC) for local talent across our site network. We continue to assess and enhance our talent and succession pipelines, recognizing their importance to our ongoing success. Additionally, we remain committed to delivering a sustainable, fair and competitive rewards program.
All our programs and actions are guided by the Lonza People Strategy which is designed to enable our people to Come, Stay and Grow and Make a Meaningful Difference. We regularly monitor the progress and impact of these programs through our Voice of Employee (VoE) engagement survey.
In 2024, we adapted and enhanced our talent acquisition processes as part of a strategic initiative to attract and acquire the right talent, ensuring we continue to drive our company’s success. This decision is grounded in our commitment to align our hiring practices with the evolving needs of our business and the competitive talent landscape.
Delivering a positive, streamlined candidate experience is critical to attracting top talent and positioning ourselves as an employer of choice within the highly competitive healthcare industry. Our new partner brings specialized expertise and industry insight aimed at supporting our efforts to identify high-quality candidates, enhance the candidate experience, reduce time-to-hire, and ensure we can continue to adapt to market trends and talent expectations. Ultimately, this partnership supports our long-term growth by ensuring that we recruit the right people who are both qualified for their roles and well suited to our company’s purpose and culture.
More than 2,800 new colleagues joined us in 2024, including around 800 who became part of our team through the acquisition of the large-scale biologics site in Vacaville (US) from Roche. Our recruitment activities at our sites across the network remained focused in delivering the critical capabilities needed to support our existing operations as well as our strategic growth projects. We further strengthened talent acquisition by improving the background check process for new hires, enhancing its efficiency, simplification, user-friendliness, and overall quality. This process is critical for hiring managers to ensure compliance, improved decision making and cultural fit, and is equally important for candidates. It reflects our commitment to our values, providing fair opportunities and fostering a safe and secure work environment.
We continued to leverage our talent referral program, and onboarded more than 630 new colleagues in 2024, who were referred to us by our current colleagues. In addition, the combination of our digital global onboarding tool and our local site-based onboarding events continues to create an enhanced new hire experience and support retention of colleagues with tenure below one year. The voluntary turnover rate of colleagues with a tenure of less than one year remains stable at 10.3% in 2024 compared to 10.6% in 2023.
We continue to review and adapt our programs to attract industry leading talent, ensuring the sustained growth of our employee community. This is important for our business continuity and will support growth plans in the coming years.
Chief Human Resources Officer
Our people are our greatest strength, and we are committed to fostering an inspiring environment where they feel valued, supported and empowered to bring their best. Looking ahead, we will continue to prioritize learning and development opportunities, along with fostering inclusion and well-being, to empower our teams to grow, develop, and innovate in ways that contribute to our long-term success.
Talent retention remained a key focus in 2024. With a 7.4% voluntary turnover, we are trending in line with our industry and are showing an improvement (from 8.3% in 2023).
To promote a positive and empowering environment, in 2024 we extended family leave in key locations, including the USA and Switzerland. Our health and well-being initiatives support colleagues through different life stages and aim to be truly inclusive. Furthermore, in 2024, we continued to expand our well-being offering. Further information can be found on page 47 of the 2024 Sustainability PDF Report.
Our Lonza Bonus program is an important tool to reward sustained high performance, with bonus payouts determined by a combination of company performance and personal performance. More information about the Lonza Bonus can be found in the Remuneration PDF Report on page 177. We also expanded our employee share purchase plan to include additional locations in 2024 to further enable our colleagues’ participation in our business success.
In 2024, more than 1,200 colleagues benefited from our “Work from Anywhere” policy, which allows eligible employees to work in a different location for up to 28 days each year upon completing a compliance review. To further empower our people and line managers, we launched the Workforce Lifecycle Hub providing centralized information, including guides, checklists and supporting systems across important events in the workforce lifecycle.
Looking to 2025, we will continue to review these programs to ensure they are competitive and meet the needs of our people.
We remain committed to building a positive and engaging environment where our colleagues are inspired and enabled to grow. Our colleagues can embark on an Employee Development Journey to define development aspirations and needs and take charge of their professional growth, using tools including mentoring, career conversations and development planning guides.
In 2024, we launched Learn@Lonza globally, an important investment showcasing our commitment to skill enhancement and continuous professional and personal growth of our people. Learn@Lonza offers every employee easy access to a customized, self-paced learning experience via a comprehensive platform that caters to diverse learning styles and needs. The platform uptake score at 15%, achieved six months following launch is considered excellent in our industry, and above the 12% benchmark.
Also in 2024, we piloted our Talent Marketplace platform in key areas of the business to further support employees’ growth. The platform is designed to help match employees' skills with internal project-based opportunities and short-term work assignments, thus leveraging existing capacities and capabilities, while creating exposure and learning opportunities for the participating colleagues.
We recognize that our people managers play a pivotal role in supporting the growth of their teams, and thus we launched in 2024 the Lonza Manager Learning Path, to support managers through targeted microlearning courses. We also further embedded our Lonza Leadership Framework across the organization. This includes the integration of our “Care, Communicate and Coach” approach into all our people programs and campaigns, including tailored leadership workshops.
Our combined focus on personal growth, professional learning, and internal career development has driven an increase in our internal mobility rate, specifically vacant positions filled by internal candidates to 43.5% in 2024 (from 39.1% in 2023). We expect that these efforts to recognize the potential of internal talent will deliver a strong return on investment and positively contribute to business continuity and future retention. Further information on our 2024 initiatives can be found on page 45 of the 2024 Sustainability PDF Report.
Our refined and extended company vision and purpose1, outlined at the end of 2024, are enabled by our people who make an extraordinary commitment and contribution to our business. To further support our vision, we developed the Lonza Engine – a framework capturing our unique set of strengths. Central to this is our high-performance culture, united as One Lonza with one purpose, one vision and shared values.
We also introduced a refreshed set of values (Collaboration, Accountability, Excellence, Passion and Integrity) which define the behaviours we expect from our global community of approximately 18,500 employees. In 2025, we will embed our new values into every aspect of our people processes, ensuring they are integral to how we select, develop, recognize and reward our talent. We will also continue our focus on leadership development and reinforce a growth mindset, through our customized learning suite, supported by best-in-class digital solutions. These actions are aimed at increasing our current and future capabilities and enabling us to achieve our strategic ambitions through the collective power of our people.
Our refined company vision: we are the pioneer and world leader in the CDMO industry, setting the pace with cutting-edge science, smart technology and lean manufacturing; our refined company purpose: we turn our customers’ breakthrough innovations into viable therapies and manufacture the medicines of tomorrow.
