The Right Chemistry: ALTANA’s Award-Winning Onboarding Programme
ALTANA AG is a global leader in specialty chemicals headquartered in Wesel, Germany.
The ALTANA Group offers innovative, environmentally compatible solutions for coating manufacturers, paint and plastics processors, the printing and packaging industries, the cosmetics sector, and the electrical and electronics industry.
ALTANA employs around 7,000 people worldwide in four business divisions and generated sales of over 3 billion euros in 2022.
Who are we exactly?
The business divisions that make up ALTANA each operate under their own brands. They offer premium products and a comprehensive array of services to customers worldwide, leveraging the group’s combined knowledge and wealth of experience. ALTANA’s guiding principles and its four corporate values of Appreciation, Openness, Empowerment to Act and Trust serve as a mandatory basis for joint, goal-oriented action for all employees.
The project team was tasked with communicating these values and the ALTANA identity and culture uniformly to all people across all locations and divisions throughout the organisation. And that called for a global, digitalised onboarding programme. The group already had local onboarding programmes. But there was no group-wide e-learning system to give new hires an overview of the entire organisation. And certainly not one that harmonised with ALTANA’s guiding principles.
The team also had to design a training programme for future leadership personnel. The brief: a system that could onboard new leaders with key leadership guidelines and illustrate a leader’s typical working day.
Three-hour e-learning programmes for new hires and leadership personnel
“We knew we had taken on a truly mammoth project,” says Andrea Pfister from ALTANA’s Talent Management CoE. “We wanted a modular e-learning system with interactive elements, videos and trailers. Onboarding@ALTANA had to be aimed at both new hires and long-serving colleagues. The idea was to have multiple options for newcomers to get to know our organisation and its culture and people. We also wanted established employees to be able to refresh their knowledge at any time.
Consequently, we took great pains to find the right provider. We needed someone who met the technical criteria, obviously, but the personal chemistry had to be right too. We knew it was going to be a long-running project that would require close consultation and intensive dialogue.”
Ines Conrad, project manager at imc, adds: "The project was also a great challenge for us as a supplier. Although there was a large number of 'individual, different' materials, these had to be combined into a sensible whole. And, of course, completely new modules had to be developed together with the technical experts. But it was also a great opportunity because it gave us a free hand and allowed us to be creative."
A greenfield project
The ALTANA team was open to creative ideas and to relying on the expertise and recommendations of the imc team. Following a joint kick-off meeting on site, ALTANA opted for a programme comprising two different but interlocking parts. The first part was the general onboarding programme – mandatory for new employees and voluntary for the old hands.
The second part was the training programme specifically for leadership personnel. The idea was that existing employees moving up into leadership roles would only have to do the leadership part. External leadership appointees, on the other hand, would have to complete both parts.
Silver Award from Brandon Hall Group and excellent in-house feedback
The result of the project is nothing short of impressive: a colourful array of e-learning formats structured into two modular, target group-specific curricula. The programme starts with an invitation e-mail and a teaser trailer that includes a welcome message from the Management Board. The content itself is delivered via web-based training sessions, with learning supported by performance cards and the Readiness Check feature. The programme also integrates the imc BizQuiz format.
This result certainly impressed the jury at human capital management gurus Brandon Hall Group, the sponsor of the annual HCM Excellence Awards. The programme won ALTANA and imc silver in the Talent Acquisition category at the 2023 awards.
The project’s success is also evident from the results of employee surveys conducted by ALTANA. In those surveys, both onboarding programmes scored over 4 on a scale of 1 to 5 – a great result.
Needless to say, ALTANA is very happy. “We are absolutely delighted with the result. What’s more, the project taught us a lot, including about communication and internal stakeholder management,” explains Andrea Pfister. “imc was an extremely enjoyable, pragmatic, open and reliable partner to work with at all times.”
