What does Equal Opportunities mean to Kvadrat?

Kvadrat is an organisation with high ambitions, both for our people and the development of our company. One of our four core values is “Empathy”. This means we are open-minded and strive to see the world around us through the eyes around us. Driven by a strong feeling of purpose, growth, and innovation, we believe the success and well-being of our people drives the success of our business. This is reflected in our commitment to create a work environment with Equal Opportunities for all, with a strong focus on equality, diversity, inclusion, and empowerment.

This means that we are committed to:

  • Fostering an environment where everyone feels valued and heard and is engaged
  • Building a diverse workforce regarding gender, age and ethnicity and encouraging diversity in leadership positions
  • Valuing collaboration over coordination and control
  • Supporting equal career development and learning opportunities
  • Championing equal pay
  • Promoting diversity across our external collaborations
  • Ensuring a healthy, attractive workplace with a good work-life balance
To achieve our commitments, we take actions that include:
  
  • Training our employees in diversity and inclusion
  • Providing unconscious bias training for managers in regard to hiring and promotions
  • Building a taskforce of diversity champions to hold the wider team accountable
  • Supporting a High Potential programme to encourage employee growth
  • Fostering robust pay assessments and compensation programs to make sure that they are fair and an equal reflection of the communities in which we are represented
  • Actively engaging with our local communities to attract and grow local and diverse talent

As part of this ongoing commitment to Equal Opportunities, we are implementing two specific initiatives. We are committed to the United Nations Sustainability Development Goal 5, Gender Equality, and given the universal relevance of gender discrimination, a focus on gender equality is an opportunity for us to target inequality across other marginalised groups. Our current targets are:

To be 50% women-led by 2025.

Inclusive leadership is essential to achieving gender diversity. It ensures equal access to resources and power, challenges preconceived gender stereotypes, and in terms of business, research shows that companies with more women on their boards perform significantly better. In 2022, the share of women in middle management at Kvadrat grew to 44%, an increase of 3% from 2021, and we improved the gender distribution of our Kvadrat A/S Board from 20% in 2021 to 33%. The representation of women within Senior Management decreased from 44% to 38% in 2021. By 2025 we want to ensure that our management team (including middle and senior management) is equally represented by men and women. By continuing to encourage this transformative leadership, we will also build role models and mentors for the next generations at Kvadrat.
To offer a minimum of eight weeks paid parental leave for all parents by 2024.  
 

To offer a minimum of eight weeks paid parental leave for all parents by 2024.
A key driver for inequality in the workplace is the unbalanced distribution of parental leave. On average, this leads to reduced salary and pension levels for the birthing parent. At Kvadrat, we strongly support the equal division of work and family life between both parents, including the equal sharing of parental leave. In 2021, we conducted a high-level assessment of national laws on parental leave across the world. We saw the need for a harmonised policy across Kvadrat globally, guaranteeing a minimum amount of paid parental leave time and regulations for both birthing and non-birthing parents, which offer equal incentives to spend leave time with new-born children. Therefore, our target is to offer a minimum of eight weeks paid parental leave for all parents – both birthing and non-birthing - by 2024. To gain a better understanding, in 2022 we started measuring the average leave time for birthing and non-birthing parents, per birth. Of all family leave at Kvadrat, 23% are non-birthing parents, but whereas birthing parents take an average of 28 weeks, non-birthing parents take an average of 9 weeks. This confirms the positive impact potential that our new parental leave policy will have on achieving a more equal leave distribution.

Understanding and monitoring underlying drivers of inequality is vital for driving long-term inclusion and equality. Along with our bi-annual performance and learning conversations, we measure our progress and monitor the pulse of our employees through our annual employee satisfaction survey. Through this direct feedback, key issues around Equal Opportunities are identified and guide further improvement so that we can adapt to the responses and needs of our employees, our community and the wider world.