Employees

By offering various learning and development opportunities as well as attractive compensation and benefits, and with our commitment to supporting a balance between personal and professional life, we want to maintain our reputation as an attractive employer. In order to continue to attract and retain talents for our company in the future, we work continuously on BASF’s attractiveness as an employer. We systematically record short and long-term opportunities and risks as part of our general opportunity and risk management.

Promoting and valuing diversity across all hierarchical levels is an integral part of our strategy and is also embedded in our corporate values. As a global company, we serve many different customer needs. We want to reflect, value and promote this diversity among our employees in order to increase their creativity, motivation and sense of belonging to BASF.

We also promote diversity in the selection and development of our leaders. We have set a global target to promote female leadership and aim to increase the proportion of women in leadership positions to 30% by 2030. We have made important progress toward this target. In the BASF Group, the global proportion of female leaders with disciplinary responsibility was 28.4% at the end of 2023 (2022: 27.2%).

BASF can rely on the engagement of its employees. Employee surveys and pulse checks are used as feedback tools to actively involve employees in shaping their working environment. We have performed regular global employee surveys since 2008, and since 2019, we have also recorded the employee engagement level as an index score based on the answers to five key questions. Overall, more than 84,400 employees worldwide participated in the 2023 survey (participation rate: 74%).¹ The survey revealed an engagement index of 79%, which constitutes a drop of two percentage points compared with the previous year (2022: 81%). Our aim is to get this score back above 80%, the target defined in the BASF strategy.

1 The scope of employees surveyed goes beyond the scope of consolidation. However, there are exceptions for companies that represent joint ventures as well as companies held for sale.

As of December 31, 2023, the number of employees increased to 111,991 employees compared with 111,481 employees as of December 31, 2022. The rise was primarily due to staff increases in Asia Pacific, especially for the new Verbund site in Zhanjiang, China. This was partially offset by retirements and departures due to dormant employment as well as measures in connection with the cost savings program focused on Europe.

BASF Group employees by region

The BASF Group hired 9,168 new employees in 2023. The percentage of employees who resigned during their first three years of employment – the early turnover rate – was 1.4% worldwide in 2023. This turnover rate was 0.8% in Europe, 3.0% in North America, 1.9% in Asia Pacific and 2.3% in South America, Africa, Middle East.

The voluntary turnover rate, or the proportion of employees who left the company voluntarily, amounted to 3.5% globally. This rate was 2.2% in Europe, 7.1% in North America, 4.7% in Asia Pacific and 5.2% in South America, Africa, Middle East.

As of December 31, 2023, the BASF Group was training 3,045 people in various occupations (2022: 3,049). We spent a total of around €130 million on vocational training in 2023.

For more information on careers at BASF, see basf.com/careers

We want to attract and retain engaged and qualified employees and motivate them to achieve top performance with a comprehensive package that includes market-oriented compensation, individual development opportunities and a good working environment. Our employees’ compensation is based on global compensation principles according to position, market and performance. As a rule, compensation comprises fixed and variable components as well as benefits that often exceed legal requirements. In many countries, these benefits include company pension benefits, supplementary health insurance and share programs. We regularly review our compensation systems at the global and local levels.

We want our employees to contribute to the company’s success. This is why the compensation granted to the vast majority of our employees includes variable compensation components, with which they participate in the success of the BASF Group as a whole and are recognized for their individual performance. The same principles essentially apply for all employees worldwide. The amount of the variable component is determined by economic success as well as the employee’s individual performance. We use the BASF Group’s return on capital employed (ROCE) to measure economic success for the purposes of variable compensation. This links variable compensation to our ROCE target.¹ Individual performance is assessed as part of a globally consistent performance management process.

BASF Group personnel expenses

1 In calculating compensation-relevant ROCE, adjustments are made for negative and positive special items resulting from acquisitions and divestitures (for example, integration costs in connection with acquisitions and gains or losses from the divestiture of businesses) when these exceed a corridor of +/–1% of the average cost of capital basis. An adjustment of the compensation-relevant ROCE (in the first 12 months after closing) therefore only occurs in cases of exceptionally high special items resulting from acquisitions and divestitures.

BASF’s Compliance Program is based on our corporate values and our voluntary commitments, as well as international standards. It describes our commitment to responsible conduct and expectations around how all BASF employees interact with business partners, officials, coworkers and the community.

At the core of our Compliance Program is the global, standardized Code of Conduct. All employees and leaders are obligated to adhere to its guidelines, which cover topics ranging from corruption and antitrust laws to human rights, labor and social standards, conflicts of interest and trade control, and protection of data privacy.

The online version of our Code of Conduct is aimed at our employees and also offers user-friendly features such as case studies, FAQs and additional references. We provide our employees worldwide with up-to-date content such as videos and links to specialist units and guidelines as well as direct contact to subject specialists on the internal online platform and the corresponding app.

The structure of BASF’s Code of Conduct

Abiding by compliance standards is the foundation of responsible leadership. This has also been embedded in our corporate values. We are convinced that compliance with these standards will play a key role in securing our company’s long-term success. Our efforts are principally aimed at preventing violations from the outset.

We perform a systematic risk assessment to identify and assess material risks of compliance violations, including corruption. These are conducted at divisional and Group company level. The regular compliance audits performed by the Corporate Audit department are another source of information for the systematic identification of risks, which are documented in the relevant risk or audit report. The same applies to specific risk minimization measures as well as the time frame for their implementation.

One key element in violation prevention is compulsory training and workshops held as classroom or online courses. Within a prescribed time frame, all employees are required to take part in basic compliance training, refresher courses and special tutorials dealing with, for example, antitrust legislation, taxes or trade control regulations.

Course materials and formats are constantly updated, taking into account the specific risks of individual target groups and business areas. In 2023, employees around the world were asked to test and refresh their knowledge in a new interactive online training course. More than 88,700 employees completed this roughly 40-minute-long refresher course. Additionally, more than 33,600 participants worldwide received over 37,000 hours of compliance training in 2023.

For more information on the BASF Code of Conduct, see basf.com/code_of_conduct