Merck champions diversity & social engagement 
2019-11-07
AFTER spending more than 20 years first in production and then in the Research and Development department at Merck, Petra Wicklandt, who holds a PhD in pharmaceutical technology, decided to embark on a new adventure with her career at the Darmstadt-headquartered German science and technology giant.
The former Global Head of Chemical & Pharmaceutical Development in Merck Healthcare R&D is now leading Merck’s Corporate Affairs department, overseeing government and public affairs, corporate responsibility, global health and bioethics for the company’s three core business sectors — Healthcare, Life Science and Performance Materials – with local and regional teams in Darmstadt, Berlin, Geneva, Brussels, Boston, Washington DC, Beijing and Shanghai.
“R&D always excited me with new projects and scientific progress but I wanted to broaden my horizon and was just ready for a change,” Wicklandt, who has been onboard for two years as senior vice president, head of Corporate Affairs at Merck KGaA, told Shanghai Daily in an interview made during her recent trip to China. “Not only at leadership level, Merck does encourage people to do different things to help them get a broader perspective. The experience I have gained from my former work is very helpful for me to understand the business opportunities, risks, challenges as well as to find the right solutions which is part of my job now.”
The personal experience of Wicklandt with the company, who was the first female pharmaceutical production leader in Darmstadt back in her younger years, offered a perfect glimpse of how the family-owned and world’s oldest pharmaceutical and chemical company adapts itself to an ever-changing, and increasingly sophisticated and competitive business world with a diversity and inclusion strategy at the core of its culture to help it stay vibrant and innovative.
“I am a true believer that overall diversity, which is not only about gender but also about nationality, cultural and educational backgrounds, religions, age groups as well as different sexual orientations, is a competitive advantage,” Wicklandt said. “A diverse workforce — paired with a respectful corporate culture — strengthens our ability to innovate and contributes significantly to our business success.”
Leading one of the most diverse teams at Merck herself, Wicklandt is one of the women leaders at Merck, who at the end of 2018, already occupied 32 percent of the company’s total leadership positions. That was three years ahead of its original target of maintaining a 30 percent representation of women in these positions by 2021.
As a matter of fact, promoting women in leadership roles remains one of the key focuses of Merck’s Diversity & Inclusion strategy. The company has formed special teams responsible for developing goals and measures which are cascaded to the departmental level to help advance female candidates into roles in different areas and hierarchies. In cultivating talent, Merck is keen to promote top-performing women to place more of them in leadership positions.
Apart from that, as Asian markets are extremely important to the company, Merck has set the new goal of fostering talent development in Asia and here especially in China. Other goals of its Diversity &Inclusion strategy also include cultivating an international work environment, taking actions against all forms of discrimination, creating teams with a balanced age structure, and building a diverse base of educational backgrounds and experience.
“Diverse teams often come up with more innovative ideas and if you don’t push out for diversity, it will become a big disadvantage and you will really miss great chances,” she said. “We need diverse teams to serve different business units with diverse customers.”
Seeing her department an ambassador for Merck, Wicklandt, who has built and lead the Corporate Affairs team since October 2017, said one trend she has perceived is that the impact companies like Merck have on the society is becoming more and more important.
With responsibility being one of its core values, Merck’s corporate responsibility strategy reflects a shared value approach that centers on creating long-lasting added value for both the company and society.
In particular, Merck is committed to supporting community and social projects at the locations where it operates and in selecting these projects, the company chooses initiatives that reflect its three spheres of activity, namely Health, Sustainable solutions and Broad Minds.
One of the company’s lighthouse Corporate Responsibility projects in China is the clean water project conducted in partnership with an NGO. Merck donates one yuan per day for every of their 3600 employees to the project since 2018 to help school children in rural western areas getting access to clean drinking water. In another initiative called Green Crystal project, the company’s staff in China are donating second-hand computer tablets to elementary school children for their daily classroom teaching and also volunteering to offer various on-site and remote teaching lessons to those students through those devices.
“You would be amazed how proud our people feel about such CR activities,” Wicklandt said, “These activities, once only seen as philanthropic ones, help engage people and engaged people are doing better at their work which is also a big benefit for the company.”
