Human Resources

Recognizing that our employees are the key to our success, we seek to be a great place to work. In 2020, we were once again recognized as a “Top Employer” in Germany by the Top Employer Institute, a global authority on recognizing excellence in people practices. Also in 2020, our subsidiary in Brazil was certified for the first time as a “Great Place to Work,” and awarded one of the “Best Workplaces” in healthcare as well as Top 5 in diagnostic medicine. Finally, our U.S. headquarters in Germantown, Maryland, was awarded five different awards by the Alliance for Workplace Excellence (AWE), including the Workplace Excellence Seal of Approval, Diversity Champion Award, and Best Practices Supporting Workers 50+.

We are committed to creating an environment that is rich in diversity and empowers all employees. Diverse teams strengthen our organization through the variety of ideas, perspectives and approaches they bring to our business. Our teams outperform and succeed when they are composed of individuals with the widest possible range of personalities, backgrounds and traits. That’s why we value each person’s uniqueness and maintain an environment where all individuals can contribute to our success based on their strengths and characteristics. In 2020, our multicultural workforce was composed of at least 80 nationalities with an average age of 40.1. With 48% women, we are well balanced in terms of gender on an aggregate level. Our strategic initiative on gender diversity, which began in 2018, has yielded remarkable results in the past years, particularly with regard to leadership positions. The participation of women in leadership roles rose from just under 28% in 2018 to just under 32% in 2020 as a result of a series of initiatives to drive awareness, engagement, and development of this area among our leadership team.

Employee development is viewed as integral to the success of creating lasting value for our customers, patients, colleagues, partners, and shareholders. We offer opportunities to work on exciting tasks and projects in an engaging work environment. Employees join QIAGEN and stay with QIAGEN because they can see how their work makes a difference to people’s lives everywhere in the world. We offer various training platforms that provide the possibility to either use our global e-learning portfolio or to participate in personal trainings usually offered in a blended format. The focus is on job-specific skills, compliance, competencies and leadership development. In 2020, we ran a mix of virtual instructor-led and e-learning courses. All in person trainings were put on hold in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Internal and external ratings have improved significantly and support our preferred position in the global working environment. Specific retention targets have been met with a 9% voluntary turnover rate for the total workforce and a voluntary turnover rate of 5% for the management level in 2020.

Since the creation of QIAGEN, management has formed a culture that seeks to attract and retain the best talent worldwide and reward associates for performance. This compensation system fosters a focus on achieving corporate strategic initiatives as well as personal accountability. We participate in various compensation benchmarking surveys that provide information on the level and mix of compensation awarded by companies and industries for a broad range of positions around the world. In the case of QIAGEN, these include many peer life science and diagnostics companies based in the U.S. QIAGEN has a “pay for performance” culture, with the compensation of employees linked to the achievement of corporate financial and individual performance goals. Business goals are established by senior management. These goals are set at ambitious levels each year to motivate and drive performance, with a focus on both short-term and long-term quantifiable objectives. Furthermore, to align our compensation programs with the interests of shareholders, management levels receive a portion of their total compensation in the form of long-term compensation, which is granted as equity as a reward for performance.

In 2020 as a consequence of the global pandemic, a large portion of our employees worked remotely beginning in the first quarter of 2020 and continuing throughout the year. For our essential workers and in our locations where a small number of employees continued to work on site, we implemented safety measures including routine on-site testing at critical manufacturing facilities to reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission.