Taking care of our employees' development and wellbeing

Our vision of enriching life inspires everything we do for all our stakeholders, including our employees. As a responsible business, we want to make a positive difference in our employees’ lives by always following our People Promise: ‘It should be fun, developing and rewarding doing a good job’.

Staff setting up table in the restaurant

Employee engagement

In 2023, we introduced new employee pulse surveys in Winningtemp, our employee listening tool, that give us timely data and insight into our employees’ engagement and wellbeing. We run these surveys at regular intervals, asking our employees to give us input and feedback so that we can track opinions and trends in real time.

Employee engagement categories in Winningtemp

Leadership
Meaningfulness
Work situation
Personal development
Job satisfaction
Autonomy
Participation
Team spirit

For 2024, we set targets for each of the employee engagement categories covered by our employee surveys. Tracking the results throughout the year, we worked closely with the teams to keep engagement levels high, taking corrective actions where necessary. This resulted in improved performance in every category compared to last year.

We put special focus on the 'Work situation' category, which relates to our employees’ workload and stress levels. Using the data from our pulse surveys, we introduced a number of initiatives to lower stress and better balance workloads, including leader training in 'health promoting leadership' and direct follow up with lower performing teams.

By increasing our leaders' skillset in decreasing stress factors in everyday work life, while also reaching out to leaders with low scores, we both actively and proactively work to handle and remove stress factors. As a result of these efforts, we saw an increase in the category score from 7.3 to 7.5 (on a scale from 0-10), showing that we can make a positive difference by diving deeper into a subject to understand the reality behind the numbers. In 2025, we will launch and implement an NLTG Work Environment Policy, which focuses on developing the organisation’s awareness of, and ability to improve, our physical and psychological work environment.

Employee development

Our mission is to be the leading holiday and experience company dedicated to wellbeing. To achieve this, we need to be innovative – and in today’s fast-paced world, that means fostering a growth mindset while encouraging our employees to drive their own learning and development. As a company, we want to create the right conditions for learning, so it becomes a part of every employee’s day-to-day work. We care for our teams, and we strive to create a work environment where we all share our learnings, support each other and learn from our mistakes.

2024, we began a training programme for all employees to help them develop a ‘Learning Mindset’, with a focus on continuous learning. The goal is to build a learning culture in which every individual drives their own growth, is curious and remains dedicated to achieving our goals together. We will continue to focus on the Learning Mindset during 2025 as it both drives innovation within the company and demonstrates to our employees that we value their growth and development. By investing in an employee’s future in this way, we can increase job satisfaction, improve engagement and raise retention rates.

Leadership development

Our leaders should always strive to maximise the contribution of others to achieve their objectives. At the beginning of 2024, we created an NLTG Leadership Compass to describe what this means at NLTG. The Leadership Compass applies to all leaders, no matter where in the organisation they work. With the Leadership Compass as our starting point, we developed several new leadership development programmes in 2024. This includes our new Enriching Leadership @NLTG – Leadership Programme for senior and middle managers, which is delivered together with Lorensbergs, a Swedish provider of training and organisational development.

Small groups of leaders begin the training on a rolling basis. In 2024, 72 leaders from across the company started the programme. The new programme for senior and middle managers supplements our existing Enriching Leadership @NLTG – Leadership Introduction. This programme gives new leaders a clear understanding of what leadership in NLTG is all about, as well as tools they can use in their everyday work. Following a request from our employees, we added another programme to our training portfolio called Leadership Fundamentals, which is designed for leaders without direct reports. In 2024, more than 100 office staff and 100 Senior Cabin Crew Members went through the training programme. We are constantly working to improve and refine all our leadership development programmes to ensure they meet the current and future requirements of our leaders.

Diversity and inclusion

We have staff working in offices, at hotels, in our airline, in warehouses and in resorts in eight countries around the world. We believe that a diverse workforce and an inclusive work environment where everyone is accepted and can be themselves is the foundation for creating an attractive workplace for all.

This can only be achieved if our workforce is diverse, our workplace is inclusive, and there is no unfair or unlawful discrimination or harassment in any of our decisions or behaviours. We have internal policies and procedures in place to ensure this is the case.

In 2024, we introduced a new concept to raise awareness and knowledge about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) across the organisation, called DEI Month, which took place in March. We posted intranet articles, arranged training and organised inspirational lectures on DEI for employees. DEI Month was a significant success. 1,840 employees completed DEI training during March, and we saw a 0.3-point increase in the 'Participation' category of our Employee Pulse Survey in the weeks after.

Throughout the year, we acknowledge special days, for example World Mental Health Day, and celebrations from different cultures and religions. This helps raise awareness and increase knowledge among our employees, while helping all employees feel seen and included.

Gender equality

As a responsible company, we strive for fair representation of genders at all levels of the company. We have chosen to create targets for the overrepresented gender, to include all genders and not just men and women. Our goal for the total workforce is to have no gender represented by more than 60%. However, even if we reach our target for the entire workforce, we may still have an unbalanced gender representation in some roles, teams and management groups. This is something we aim to address in the coming years, focusing on areas where there is an imbalance and initiating activities to increase the underrepresented gender.

Once again, in 2024, we were within our targets for the total workforce. We also reached our targets for all management levels. The goals that we have set are ambitious, and we will continue to work hard to maintain them to ensure a good gender balance.

As well as gender representation, equal pay is an important goal in our equality agenda. We are now mapping pay across our organisation to identify any gaps and will be taking actions where needed in 2025.