Empowering our people at Dentsply Sirona

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Bringing Out the Best in Our People

We strive to bring out the best in people, from employees to patients and the dental professionals who serve them. In 2020, we revised our People strategy to ensure it would continue to support our purpose. Namely, we:

Established a comprehensive talent review process
Implemented an enhanced performance development process that promotes ongoing feedback and coaching
Launched a Global Employee Assistance Program
Established a single, global approach to talent acquisition
Deployed a 360-leadership assessment
Piloted an HR Operations Center in Europe and hired a global leader to build the HR Operations strategy and infrastructure as part of our journey to standardize and digitize our HR administrative processes globally
Reinforced a sense of shared responsibility and ownership for employee engagement
Offered greater flexibility for employees by introducing a Global Flexible Work Arrangement Policy

Empowerment Through a Diverse and Inclusive Workforce

We are committed to promoting a diverse, inclusive, and respectful culture to bring out the very best in our global workforce and encourage creativity to flourish. To do this, we go beyond, challenging the status quo to create a work environment that values every employee.

In July 2020, we increased focus on supporting our employees as the global pandemic took hold, asking for ideas on how we could better help them through the crisis. In the U.S., we piloted an interactive feedback tool known as "BluePulse," and used it to conduct a D&I Pulse Check amongst our U.S. colleagues. This allowed us not only to test a new engagement channel, but to also obtain additional, confidential input from our people about their D&I experiences at Dentsply Sirona. Most participants agreed that their teams are diverse and inclusive, noting both positive experiences and opportunities for progress. Employees also responded positively to the D&I strategy, with 81% saying they were open to D&I education.

The key elements of our D&I Action Plan include the following:

Planning programs to develop and source diverse and early career talent
Hiring a D&I Lead to champion the Company’s diversity and inclusion strategy
Chartering a Company-wide D&I Council
Evaluating current policies and processes to ensure inclusivity, including introducing an enhanced paid parental leave policy for full-time U.S. employees, effective June 1, 2021
Enhancing awareness and understanding to foster inclusion and address unconscious bias across all levels of the organization
Coaching people managers to use performance development tools to drive inclusive behaviors and practices
Facilitating mentorship, networking, and talent development to enhance knowledge, build cross-functional capabilities, and encourage development and sponsorship of diverse, high-potential talent
Measuring progress, communicating regularly with employees and key stakeholders via pulse checks, engagement surveys, and Employee Resource Groups
Became signatories of the cross-sector Paradigm for Parity partnership building on our actions to create a better, healthier and equitable world.

Our Diversity & Inclusion Council

We’re committed to promoting a diverse, inclusive, and respectful culture to bring out the very best in our global workforce and encourage creativity to flourish.

Gender Pay

We are committed to being part of the solution to close the global gender pay gap. This includes Board-level reporting of D&I metrics, regularly evaluating compensation practices, and rolling out D&I scorecards for Management Committee members.

Paradigm for Parity

As a member of Paradigm for Parity, we have made a cross-sector diversity commitment. Paradigm for Parity is a coalition of more than 130 CEOs, executives, board members, founders, and experts dedicated to providing women and men equal opportunity and power, and achieving gender parity by 2025.
In becoming signatories to the coalition and the goal, we pledge to grow a diverse talent pool, improve employee diversity and gender balance, advocate for women's advancement in senior positions within the company, and measure and monitor our progress to ensure accountability.

Employee Engagement

Building and maintaining an engaged workforce is a major priority for us. This means seeking, listening to, and acting on employee feedback, and giving our people the opportunity to volunteer in local communities individually or as part of a team.

Employee Engagement Surveys

We regularly provide opportunities for our employees to voice their thoughts and opinions on how we can improve the employee and customer experience through various channels, including annual engagement and pulse surveys. We also equip our people managers with post-survey tools, so that they can create meaningful action plans with their teams.

In 2020, on top of our annual employee engagement survey, we also organized a global post-COVID "return to workplace" pulse survey and a D&I Pulse Check in the U.S.

Overall, we’ve seen positive results from our employee survey efforts. Our employee engagement score has increased 31% since our first global survey with Gallup in 2018.

We've also piloted initiatives to improve employee engagement, such as DS24hours, where Dentsply Sirona’s senior management team hosted an all-Company event to promote the Company’s culture and purpose. In 24 one-hour timeslots, executive leaders addressed employees in a total of 90 global locations via live video stream with simultaneous translation in 10 languages, and employees spoke directly to senior leadership and asked location-specific questions.

Employee Volunteerism

We firmly believe that work should be purposeful, and strive to have our employees put this belief into practice through their daily work and community partnerships or volunteerism opportunities.

Dentsply Sirona Employees Making a Difference for Christmas

Every year, Dentsply Sirona employees around the world participate in initiatives to support charities during the festive period. Dentsply Sirona employees demonstrated their generosity in a variety of ways:

Bensheim, Germany

Employees set up an online platform for the annual donation drive as teams worked from home. Despite the change in format, employees raised €5,000 for the Bensheim Community Foundation, the biggest donation to date.

Jan Siefert, Managing Director at Dentsply Sirona in Bensheim, says, “We are proud that our employees are getting involved under the given circumstances and supporting regional initiatives with a donation. We are therefore pleased to be able to show the solidarity of Dentsply Sirona – one of the largest employers on the Bergstrasse – with the region by increasing the donation this year.”

U.S.

Employees participated in Alexander’s Toy Truck, Inc. for the 4th year in a row, sending gifts to hospitalized children. Due to COVID-19, all donations were made online via the charity’s Amazon wish list, an approach that empowered more employees than ever to participate in the initiative. In total, more than 200 bags of toys were donated.

Australia

Dentsply Sirona leaders gifted team members with a Christmas care package rather than the annual Christmas team lunches and dinners, due to local COVID restrictions. Team members also had the opportunity to donate their care packages to the Wishing Tree Appeal, an organization that provides gifts to young adults in need. As a result, the Company donated approximately $7,000.00 AUD in gifts, with around 60 Dentsply Sirona team members choosing to donate their Christmas gifts.

Talent Management at Dentsply Sirona

We are committed to recruiting, hiring, and developing high-potential, qualified talent regardless of race, color, sex, age, national origin, disability, religion, sexual orientation, or veteran status. We conduct an annual Talent Development Review process, which strengthens our talent pipeline, aids succession planning, and increases the visibility of diverse talent.

Additional resources planned for 2021 include our online learning library, global mentoring platform, Early Career and Inclusive mentoring programs, and Leadership Mentoring program.

Partnering to Ensure a Diverse Talent Pool

As part of our commitment to an equitable, inclusive recruitment and talent retention strategy, we'll be undertaking a project to understand diverse talent availability by role and location. Working with an external benchmarking expert, Affirmity, will create outputs that, when shared with leadership, will be used as a benchmark to ensure progress and accountability. We will use this information to build diverse candidate sourcing strategies.

Employee Development

Dentsply Sirona has made considerable investments in the learning and development of our employees across all levels in recent years. We planned an Early Career Program in the U.S., and with its launch in 2021, focused on hiring co-ops, interns, and recent college graduates to prepare them for accelerated long-term growth within our organization. We recently launched our Talent Development Review (TDR), an automated, global process to evaluate employee performance and potential, build awareness of diverse and upcoming talent, and improve succession preparedness. We also provided employee and manager toolkits in multiple languages across our global network to support employees with new workplace norms (for example, remote work, time management, and goal setting).

In October 2020, we launched our Leadership College Channel on Yammer, a communication and social learning platform to allow managers to grow their skills, lead others, and contribute to the business by asking questions, discussing resources and ideas, and sharing experiences and best practices. The channel has more than 3,500 members, over 600 of whom are active.

In 2021, we plan to launch a multilingual, global online learning library, which all employees can use at any time for their own learning and development. Finally, we are instituting a global mentoring platform to build our talent pipeline and enhance our focus on mentoring.

Employee Health and Well-Being

We understand the stressors that exist in a fast-paced, evolving world, and recognize the role we play as employers in supporting the mental and physical well-being of our employees. This became even more important during the pandemic. Teams around the world launched programs and initiatives designed to support employee health and well-being, including the twice-daily, on-site stretching program, Flexi Power Yoga, for staff at our Manesar site and the digital “Fit & Hungrig” ("Fit & Hungry") campaign, which brought employees together to take part in virtual workouts, rolled out by Dentsply Sirona DACH.

We launched our global Employee Assistance Program (EAP) in 2020 as a well-being resource, free of charge for employees and their families. The confidential, easily accessible service provides 24/7 support through a variety of channels and in multiple languages. Our EAP provider, Workplace Options, is an independent party bound by professional standards regarding confidentiality, and does not disclose any information shared by individuals who have contacted the service unless the individual poses a risk to themselves or others.

All of our employee health and well-being activities are supported by robust health and safety programs at site level and by our Environmental Health and Safety Management System, including policies and global standards, training, and culture.

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2020 Sustainability Report

Read the latest Sustainability Report to learn how Dentsply Sirona is giving back to the planet and key stakeholders.

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