People and Culture

Almarai’s ability to deliver outstanding products, efficient operations and strong financial results is a clear reflection of the outstanding talent we have at every level of the organization. During this year, we maintained focus on supporting and engaging all our dedicated employees to reinforce our culture while empowering them to excel and perform to their potential.

WE@Almarai is a market-leading employee value proposition that sets Almarai apart and positions the Company as an employer of choice for our industry in the Kingdom. Sitting at the heart of our corporate culture, it establishes our quality makers and aligns them to form a single path to greatness, by recognizing the importance of engaging our employees and keeping them satisfied in order to support operational excellence and strategic progress.

Our ongoing commitment to our quality makers remained the core of our support for the progress and skill development of our employees in 2022. We continued to foster a vibrant and innovative workplace that unlocks progressive value for quality makers and the business.

Ensuring Diversity and Inclusiveness

As a certified Gold Member of the Mowaamah programme, Almarai recognizes the highest standards and practices in establishing a working environment that is welcoming and accessible to people with disabilities.
We are also a certified Gold and Founder member of the Qadeeron network, which also advances inclusivity in the workplace for people with disabilities.

We maintained our commitment to supporting the national talent development goals of the Kingdom in 2022 through a range of ongoing initiatives. We hired around 1,000 new Saudi staff this year, including 234 trainees joining the FIP Institute. We also maintained our Nitaqat status in all categories in platinum and high green, while achieving the targets for Nitaqat professions. Furthermore, we continued to provide all national development programmes, with 71 Saudis enrolled in our Tamheer programme and 44 in our Cooperative Training (Coop) programme this year. We also hired over 100 new female staff this year, with a particular focus on enhancing inclusiveness in Executive and management positions.

Training and Developing our People

Our development programmes, processes and opportunities enable everybody to thrive, whether they are fresh hires, mid careers or experienced professionals. Our “build-from-within” approach to talent development is about fostering learning spirit and realizing potential, not only in our work context but also within ourselves. We believe in giving every employee access to a range of continuous personal and professional development opportunities to meet their career aspirations.

Our learning and development strategy is aligned with Almarai’s 2025 Vision and drives progress towards making Almarai a sustainable, successful organization. It is also aligned with the broader Human Capability programme envisaged by Saudi Vision 2030, to ensure that Saudi citizens have the required capabilities, skills and competencies to enhance the Kingdom’s current and future global competitiveness.

Almarai Academy

Our flagship Almarai Academy is an established industry benchmark in offering general leadership programmes, topic-focused trainings, customized behavioral interventions and cross-divisional learning programmes. The Academy provides a comprehensive suite of outstanding courses led by first-class professionals in a wide range of well researched, competitive and future-oriented specialty areas, such as Growth through Innovation, Strategic Thinking and Planning, Resilience and Agility, Change and Crisis Management, Digital Transformation and Finance Acumen for Non-Finance Professionals.

In the past year, 1,475 employees benefitted from 43,740 hours of immersive learning experience as part of their development journeys. Employees, at all levels and across all functions, also undergo on-the-job training with the aim to strengthen their capabilities in line with job dynamics and workflows, and broadly, the Company culture.

The Academy successfully employs digital technologies to offer high-quality virtual learning opportunities that broaden our learning reach through provision of accessible and flexible learning experiences for diverse learners across the organization. Virtual trainings replicate the fundamentals of face-to-face classroom trainings to an online experience, in real-time. Our eLearning platform helps to deliver active, engaging, and relevant content through the adoption of best practices for learning with technology. This virtual learning environment has enabled us to bring our employees closer to the ever-changing technology trends and industry best practices, while still providing the required learning transfer in a cost effective, engaging way for all learners, regardless of their location.

Our leadership programmes, in collaboration with worldclass business schools and institutes, prepare our leaders for tomorrow to tackle real-world challenges. We offer transformative, human-centered leadership programmes for all our management and team leaders, tailored to the challenges faced and skills needed at each level. Keeping in line with the fast-paced world, all the leadership programmes have been delivered through a virtual platform, providing a real-time and engaging learning experience.

Food Industries Polytechnic (FIP)

Almarai launched a national initiative in 2011, in partnership with the public sector, to enhance community development by developing high caliber Saudi youth for the Food Industry. Food Industries Polytechnic (FIP) is a premier institute providing a number of diversified programmes related to the food supply chain to train and equip young Saudi Nationals with essential knowledge and skills to build promising careers in the food industries.

FIP and all its training programmes are accredited by national and international accrediting bodies, such as the Education and Training Evaluation Commission (ETEC) and ISO 29993: 2017. FIP is an accredited center for the Health and Safety Training programme of the Ministry of Human Resource and Development (HRSD), and maintains an active partnership with the Ministry of Industries through Industrial Cluster.

FIP has institutional memberships with international food organizations, including the American Institute of Baking (AIB), International Association for Cereal Science and Technology (ICC), and ISEKI Food Association. Since 2011, FIP has delivered training to 1,934 Saudi employees at Almarai and has achieved an average course satisfaction rate of 92% since 2019.

Succession Planning

Almarai uses a structured and systematic succession planning programme to identify and develop employees to fill critical business roles within the organization. The objective of succession planning is to ensure continuity in key positions and develop intellectual capital for the future. During periods of significant change or challenge, Almarai’s succession planning has ensured that there is a strong talent pool of personnel available with the corporate values and behaviors needed to lead the Company into the future.

Succession Planning has been established for the top N-1 level (direct reports to CEO) and is ongoing. In 2022, the programme extended to business-critical positions two levels down from the CEO. We successfully completed the calibration of its entire talent pool of 1,450 managers covering all M grades across the Company. The insights gained from the talent review allow Almarai to make strategic talent decisions and more effectively plan for the Company’s future.

Building Digital Capabilities

During 2022, we continued to build capabilities and drive efficiencies through enhanced digital channels and engagement for our employees.

We introduced multiple enhancements in SuccessFactors to maximize efficiencies and ensure legal compliance, upgraded the SuccessFactors Recruiting module, and launched a new homepage in SuccessFactors for an enhanced user experience.

We also developed and implemented our new Performance Management Form, launched a new SAP Jam platform that helps to raise the engagement among our employees, and successfully recertified our Human Resources for ISO 9001:2015 certification.

Engaging our People

To ensure a healthy, engaged and productive workforce, we carried out countless events and initiatives within our facilities and across our communities during the year. We aim to inspire and encourage our employees by engaging them in a range of campaigns, communications and activations, including:

Almarai Marathon – getting our employees moving in line with the goals of WE Care.

Mental Health Awareness campaign – promoting a working environment that protects the mental health of all employees, in line with WE Care.

Celebrating employee occasions – engaging the quality makers with Almarai by celebrating the moments and milestones of our employees.

Celebrating National and International days – to strengthen the relationship between Almarai and the quality makers. Wellbeing initiatives – 150 health activities across all quality makers to improve mental, physical and nutritional health.

Looking towards 2023

Our commitment to ensuring that we have the right talent at every level of the organization and that every employee is supported and engaged will remain a top priority for Almarai in 2023. We continue to invest in our capabilities and build skills and strength to deliver our strategy, with a particular focus strengthening HR infrastructure and reinforcing our corporate culture.

We plan to continue the process of enhancing our HR policies by benchmarking and adopting HR best practices in Almarai’s governing policies, including developing a holistic HR manual, employee handbooks, etc. We will also enhance and expand our job architecture framework to become broad-banded rather than specific to current roles and responsibilities, allowing for growth and development of our employees as they progress their careers with Almarai.

Finally, we will seek to enhance Almarai’s performancedriven culture by instilling employee performance management. We have already kick started the appraisal phase of our new performance management programme for a segment of the Almarai population. In the year ahead, we will expand and deploy the full programme to deliver comprehensive performance management that is completely integrated with the performance outcomes of our other HR processes