Our employees
GF employees are the driving force behind the company's success and play the most important role in the realization of its five-year strategy. GF's company tagline, "Going Forward", inspires a collaborative spirit at all levels and locations, encouraging new approaches to teamwork and supporting each employee's personal and professional growth. As a leading global company with a focus on sustainability and innovation, GF strives to offer attractive employment conditions in line with the market.
In 2022, despite the ongoing effects of COVID-19 and other challenges, GF's global teams demonstrated exceptional resilience and dedication. As GF entered the second year of its five-year strategy cycle, it continued to realize its vision to become a sustainability and innovation leader providing superior customer value.
As set out in the GF Sustainability Framework 2025, an integral part of its Strategy 2025, the company strives to offer a diverse, engaging and safe workplace. In 2022, GF published its Diversity, Engagement and Inclusion Policy, thus consolidating the existing directives and practices on this topic into a single document.
GF values
To unlock the potential of a company's teams, a common culture with shared values is essential. GF promotes a culture that focuses on creating highly efficient teams, fosters a caring and inclusive environment, and promotes learning and growth.
Three values underpin GF’s culture:
+ Caring is about being part of a team.
+ Learning is about having an open mind.
+ Performance is about speed and excellence.
Culture Movement
GF continued to roll out the Culture Movement in 2022. This initiative encompasses all employees at all seniority levels and aims to embed the GF values in their daily activities. A number of Change Agents, employees who have volunteered to participate actively in the movement, are helping to convey the values and behaviors to local teams. In 2022, an estimated 300 Change Agents led some 2’400 employees in "team experiments" focusing on how to apply the values in their day-to-day work.
In November, GF celebrated the first anniversary of the Culture Movement with more than 4’200 employees worldwide attending a global hybrid event. Held over two sessions to accommodate different time zones, the event featured exchanges between the GF Executive Committee and Change Agents about their experiences with the Culture Movement.
Employees per division
Employees per region
Number of apprentices
Number of apprentices per country
Attracting new talents
To position itself as an employer of choice in 2022, GF ran targeted social media campaigns to address potential employees in various demographic categories, for example, with the "Meet our pioneers" campaign.
For GF, creating a diverse and inclusive culture starts with the talent recruitment process. In line with the company's ambition to create a diverse and inclusive workplace, recruiters and managers from Germany, Austria and Switzerland underwent training on unconscious biases in recruiting, promotion and performance evaluations.
Diversity in education is also very important at GF, and both higher education and vocational trainings are highly valued. In 2022, the company joined UNITECH, a pan-European network through which GF can recruit top graduates from some of the leading technical universities in Europe. To shine a spotlight on the company's focus on innovation, GF Machining Solutions invited prospective apprentices at a job fair in Switzerland to program and rewire a robotic arm so it could complete a simple task – namely, picking up a piece of chocolate.
Nurturing existing talents
GF offers its employees online and in-person training that enables them to work on the skills needed in today's fast-changing and increasingly digitalized economy. For example, the GF Academy provides a broad range of internal training and opportunities to drive personal and professional development. Among these are advanced leadership training sessions, including modules geared specifically to female leaders.
GF also continually encourages its employees to take control of their professional growth and development. It supports employees through various programs and processes, such as the Talent Management initiative launched in 2021 that features the application "MyNextBigStep". The initiative aims to motivate employees to prepare, apply for and take the next big step in their careers at GF. In this way, GF aims to foster stronger employee commitment and discover new talents who are looking to learn and advance.
Digitalization also enables employees spread across over 30 countries to get to know one another better as individuals and professionals. In 2022, GF Piping Systems launched "GF Mystery Coffee", a platform that gives employees the opportunity to benefit from GF's global presence. After employees register, an algorithm finds a random match, and two colleagues then engage in a virtual exchange. Such exchanges foster cross-departmental and cross-country collaboration.