People and Culture
We believe that our people are the key to the company’s success. Their performance, well-being, and personal development have a significant impact on brand reputation, consumer satisfaction, and, ultimately, our financial performance.
Our goal is to develop a culture that values our employees’ experience, unique differences, well-being, and performance. To support this aim, we rely on our six values – Courage, Ownership, Innovation, Team Play, Respect, and Integrity – across our people policies and processes, including how we hire, develop, promote, and evaluate performance. These values underpin our culture and are the essence of our identity. They underscore the behaviors and mindsets we value in our colleagues, represent the attitude we want to see in each other, and help us achieve top performance.
Our business model is fundamentally driven by people, encompassing skilled and creative individuals. As a result, fostering excellent working conditions and supporting freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining are material for us. This includes ensuring secure employment, promoting a healthy work-life balance with flexible and fair working time, enhancing employee engagement and development, creating an inclusive workplace for all employees that leverages everyone’s talent, and providing competitive and adequate wages. These factors are crucial for attracting and retaining top talent, which in turn guarantees high product quality and the ability to meet consumer demands. see esrs s1 – own workforce
Employees worldwide
64,938
Employee share by region1
Our continued focus on our people can be further explained by our priorities around creating an equal playing field for all, leadership, and performance. These pillars seek to focus our efforts on people and culture by:
Creating a level playing field for everyone: Inclusion means valuing and leveraging the differences of our talents, consumers, and partners, while ensuring they are treated fairly and respectfully to enhance performance and unleash creativity. By creating a level playing field for everyone, we ensure that every individual has an equal opportunity to thrive and unleash high performance. By recruiting talent with diverse backgrounds and fostering a welcoming environment, we create a workplace where everyone commits and contributes at their full potential.
Women in leadership positions
41%
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Attracting, developing, and retaining key talent: adidas continues to be recognized as an employer of choice, consistently earning top positions in leading global rankings. We maintained strong placements in Forbes’ World’s Best Employers and Universum’s Most Attractive Employers lists. Additionally, adidas ranked among the top 20 companies in Forbes’ Global Top Companies for Women, and for the second consecutive year, adidas achieved the number one ranking in Stern Magazine’s category ‘Clothing, Shoes, Sporting Goods.’ Beyond these achievements, adidas was honored with the RippleMatch Campus Forward Award for excellence in recruitment strategies, underscoring our commitment to attracting and developing top talent.
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Building role-model leaders who empower people: Our development offerings focus on growing leadership behaviors and the essential skills needed to ensure our continued success, across all different seniorities. In addition, our leaders receive inclusive leadership training through our ‘Leading with Inclusion’ program. Our ambition is to inspire and nurture talented leaders from our diverse markets who exemplify our leadership behaviors in their day-to-day work. Through our leadership framework, we aim to establish a language that can support our people in embedding these behaviors in all moments and hold each other accountable to the highest standards. We undertake different initiatives to elevate and enhance our leadership pipeline.
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Creating a premier employee experience: Ensuring a positive and impactful employee experience is a key focus for us. We do this through listening to feedback from our employees, offering opportunities for flexibility, and focusing on well-being. To support a healthy lifestyle and mental well-being, our employees have access to a wide range of sports activities, events, and facilities. We have corporate gyms at many locations worldwide, including Herzogenaurach, Portland, Gurgaon, Shanghai, Dubai, and Manchester. Many of our office buildings have lockers and showers, allowing employees to include sports in their working day or cycle to work. To meet employee needs in a hybrid work setup, programs are both local and virtual to support teamwork and a healthy lifestyle. Offerings include hybrid sports classes, medical and psychosocial consultations (in-person and virtual), tools for digital disconnection, and carefully curated sessions on life topics.
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Instilling a mindset of continuous learning: We continue to promote a high-performance culture by developing our employees and rewarding performance. We offer a wide range of learning and development opportunities, including online learning resources and interactive learning experiences that provide personal and professional growth opportunities for our workforce. Our investments in digital learning and development opportunities offer equitable access to learning content and just-in-time upskilling or reskilling.
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Recognizing and rewarding both individual and team performance: The key focus of our rewards approach is to attract, retain, and motivate individuals through remuneration and benefits that are inclusive, fit for purpose, and competitive in the marketplace – thus enabling us to achieve our strategic objectives. To promote a high-performance culture, it is essential that we focus on performance management to ensure fair and equitable reward and recognition.