Henkel has appointed Anke Meier as its first global Diversity Manager, extending the strategic advantages of the company’s inherent diversity. Meier reports directly to Kasper Rorsted, Vice Chairman of the Henkel Management Board and Executive Vice President Human Resources. In 11 years with the company, Meier has gathered significant experience abroad in various international finance-related positions. She was previously Henkel’s chief financial officer in the UK and Ireland and served on Henkel’s global Audit team, working at many of the company’s international sites.

An economist by profession, Meier is delighted to receive this new responsibility. “The level of personnel diversity that we have in our own ranks – manifested, for example, in different areas of expertise, cultures and age structures – is enormous. We are committed to supporting our employees in developing their various abilities and skills. We also want to make sure that they know how much we appreciate their individual qualities and distinctive characteristics as important assets for our company. Our aim now is to further develop and strategically deploy these factors of success. The position, newly created at Henkel, is for me both an honor and an exciting challenge.”

With 53,000 employees from 110 nations, Henkel is one of the most internationally aligned German companies. Given this background, diversity management is an important issue at Henkel. With this newly created position, Henkel intends to strengthen diversity as a strategic factor for success within today’s internationally competitive environment. “Only through the diversity of our employees can we understand the markets of the more than 125 countries in which we are represented by our products. The better we are able to harness diversity, the more successful we will be as a global player,” commented Rorsted, underlining the importance of this decision.

In 2006, Henkel developed its “Diversity Cockpit,” a program to gather and organize the most important worldwide statistics on the subject of diversity within the company. One result from this research showed  that the proportion of female managers employed at Henkel exceeds 25 percent, above the European market average. In addition to gender, the “Cockpit” also reveals dimensions on age and internationality in the worldwide managerial structure at Henkel.

Early in 2007, Henkel signed the initiative "Diversity as an Opportunity – the Diversity Charter of German Companies,” on the basis of which representatives of Germany’s business world have been supporting the diversity concept.