We dare to make an impact.

We believe leadership is everyone’s business.
As a Henkel employee, you have the power to lead change. From improving collaboration to showing full ownership in results, you can inspire the people around you and help build a strong foundation to shape Henkel’s company culture. We encourage our employees to consider the Henkel values in their behavior and decisions every day. It is on all of us at Henkel to bring the four Leadership Commitments to life. 

1. We act as entrepreneurs
We dare to take risks to shape exciting business opportunities. We are committed to drive innovations and day-to-day improvements. We encourage a culture of timely and clear decision making.

2. We collaborate as strong teams
We always act as one team in the best interest of Henkel. We collaborate based on trust and transparency. We value diversity, curiosity and open-mindedness.

3. We develop people with passion
We take responsibility to build and develop the best team. We challenge and recognize our people. We give and take feedback and learn continuously.

4. We own our results
We create the best solutions for our customers. We take hands-on responsibility to achieve ambitious goals. We keep our promises and commitments.

 

Meet Kerstin, Director Innovation Packaging: “How to become a female leader and inspire others by doing so? Work at Henkel. On my way to leadership as Director Innovation Packaging at Adhesive Technologies, team collaboration and entrepreneurship resulted in great new innovations. My success empowers not just me but other women as well. I take Henkel’s Leadership Commitments very seriously and support my team to grow into their own power.”

It’s a priority at Henkel to foster a workplace culture that inspires every colleague to feel a sense of belonging and together drive our success.

Diversity & Inclusion are more than buzzwords, they are a “must have”, deeply embedded in our corporate strategy and company values. Our employees come from various ethnic and cultural origins, bring diverse skills, backgrounds and abilities and are diverse in many other dimensions. Therefore, we actively promote inclusive behaviors among our employees, raise awareness, and foster an environment that welcomes and embraces individual differences. Learn more about Henkel’s culture of belonging.

We outline a new concept of Smart Work.
We acknowledge our employee’s need for flexibility and to have a more symbiotic work-life balance. By aiming for a combination of mobile and office work and offering high flexibility for individual needs, we lay the foundation for the productive work environment of the future. While some roles will always require working on-site, and others don’t require a physical presence in the office, many positions at Henkel are hybrids. We believe that mobile work can be possible for up to 40% of the work time for hybrid roles. It could also be one week per month. Our offices have, and always will, play a crucial role in our company culture – they enable collaboration and innovation and are a place of belonging and community that shapes the Henkel spirit. We will continue to upgrade our work environments, offices, buildings and make them even more future-ready.

We believe having a career and a family should be possible for everyone.
An essential part of a good work-life-flexibility is giving parents more freedom and the chance to work from home or elsewhere, not just in the office. Infrastructure plays a significant role in this context. We offer or facilitate childcare and other services to support our employees and their families.

We offer international opportunities.
Henkel helps you expand your horizons because people with international experience make our global team inspirational, closer and successful. In a company with the dimensions of Henkel, your career path does not have to be linear. Try positions, locations, or even countries. We promote a Triple Two philosophy, which supports especially high-performing employees to work in at least two different areas (e.g., Controlling, Sales), two different countries and two different business units throughout their career.

We count on performance. And reward it.
It is an integral part of our company culture to reward performance and to motivate and incentivize our employees. We believe in setting ambitious targets and rewarding strong and top performance accordingly. This is in addition to locally competitive and attractive benefits offerings. 

We support our employees in developing their skill set to the fullest.
Do you want to upskill yourself and expand your knowledge and capabilities? We got you covered with our Henkel Learning Hub! You can access more than 8,000 classroom and digital learning resources on different topics and broaden your professional horizon. Our ambition is to future-proof our employees by helping them to build the vital skills they need and enable them to unleash their full potential through learning. 

We believe in the power of feedback for your development. That is why our on-going feedback culture will enable you to give and receive feedback from your colleagues, co-workers or superiors at any time. To make it even easier, we initiated a new feedback tool to foster this, it will also enable you to send and receive KUDOS cards to your colleagues to show appreciation and celebrate each other.

We create opportunities to grow early on.
Our Global Onboarding Program „BE PART” gives you a jump start at Henkel. With digital content and offline activities, BE PART supports our new employees in understanding the Henkel way of working and to get settled in quickly. You will receive all the important information you need for your exciting first 6 months with us.

We strongly believe in early responsibility. Therefore, you will be assigned projects from an early stage to be challenged, learn, create, and move forward.

 

We are always on the move and searching for new and great ideas.
As we stated in our first Leadership Commitment, we act as entrepreneurs. That means you must anticipate future trends and customer needs faster than the market, be proactive and strive for your ideas. We always try to be quick when experimenting, then scale up or let go. We invite you to help us extend our business models from pure product to offering after-sales, new services, and outcome-based solutions. Our Consumer Brands unit launched Choicify, an AI-driven color consultation app. With Persil Service, we added a mobile-first textile cleaning service to the Laundry & Home Care market. Our Henkel Adhesive Technologies unit make it possible for paper straws to withstand immersion in liquid for a more extended time. 
 

We create opportunities to grow early on.
With our various programs for students and graduates to explore their talent, passion, and ideas while being guided and mentored along the way, we make sure to look out for talent. We strongly believe in early responsibility and, therefore, create programs where young professionals are challenged and given the chance to learn, create, and move forward. No matter which team, functional area, or business field, we encourage our employees to participate – as an intern as well as an international manager. At Henkel, we believe that this is what jobs of the future are built on.

 

Meet Nicolas, Regional Purchasing Manager: “I started at Henkel as a trainee in Brazil and moved to Germany six years later. My supervisors and mentors helped me grow and craft my career. I was given responsibility early on and am thankful for the countless opportunities. A favorite project of mine was to reduce our global footprint by changing local power supply contracts from normal to green energy. This company is always on the move. Just like me.”

We are committed to leadership in sustainability.
We aim to create sustainable value with everything we do — together with our employees, partners, and stakeholders. We take responsibility for the safety and health of our employees, customers and consumers, the protection of the environment and the quality of life in the communities in which we operate.

We are committed to becoming a net-zero company.
We act upon our responsibility to help limit global warming to 1.5°C and have therefore set ourselves an ambitious net-zero target that have been validated by the Science Based Targets initiative. By 2045, Henkel commits to reducing absolute greenhouse gas emissions by 90 percent (vs. 2021). As an intermediate step, new science-based near-term targets were set for 2030.

We drive progress towards a circular economy by creating smarter packaging.
Our mission is to include materials from sustainable sources into smart designs to close the loop. Our goal is to design packaging with the most sustainable materials available, while using the least possible amount of packaging material – all without compromising the high level of performance expected by consumers. By 2025, we aim to reduce the amount of virgin plastics from fossil sources in our consumer products by 50 percent. We will achieve this by increasing the proportion of recycled plastic to more than 30 percent, by reducing the plastic volume, and by increasingly using bio-based plastics.

We are committed to enhancing our positive impact on communities.
We want to actively contribute to social progress and empowering people. For 2025, we have set ourselves the goal to contribute to improving the lives of 20 million people worldwide. To promote social progress, we cooperate with non-profit organizations. For example, the focus of the partnership with the development organization Solidaridad is on training and continuing education for smallholder farmers, to improve livelihoods and strengthen nature conservation through the use of organic farming methods.

 

Meet Eduardo, International Packaging Manager: "It has always been important to me to not just work, but to somehow improve people's lives. At Henkel, I found a place that allows me to develop in my field, have fun at work, and make the world more sustainable. As a packaging manager, my mission is to reduce plastic consumption. To me, that‘s more than „just a job“.”

We organize our engagement in three areas.

1. Corporate Volunteering: As part of our corporate engagement, we support our employees and retirees in their individual volunteering in education, social, health, culture and ecology and team volunteering for future-fit.

2. Social Partnerships: As part of our corporate engagement, we enter into social partnerships and activities in communities we operate in to support education, driven by Henkel Corporate Citizenship and Business Units.

3. Emergency Aid: After natural disasters, Henkel responds quickly and un-bureaucratically, providing aid wherever it is needed in the world.

We created two foundations.
Since 1958 the Dr. Jost Henkel Stiftung promotes academic diversity and supports ambitious young people in pursuing their studies – in a flexible, unique, and international way. In January 2011, Henkel established the Fritz Henkel Stiftung, which serves as the umbrella for our social engagement and fosters our activities. It underscores our long commitment to social involvement that goes beyond just direct business interests.

 

Meet Isabella, Regional Diversity and Inclusion Manager LATAM: "I work at Henkel as a D&I manager, and the company's social engagement always inspires me. I joined one of the MIT projects in Uganda and volunteered at an Orphanage. This initiative was started and ran by another Henkel colleague and has positively impacted more than 1,000 people in Uganda in terms of education, health, job security, and safety. By joining projects like this, I can make an impact not just in my professional work but also locally around the world in societies."