In brief
Strategy
Business performance
Corporate governance
ESG
Financial statements
Other
Annual Report 2022 — NORDEN
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MATERIAL TOPIC 2: CULTURE
health as a natural part of working in NORDEN. These initia-
tives aim to build resilience, ensure well-being as well as enable
all employees to operate as a globally connected team.
• To mark NORDEN's 150-year birthday, colleagues from all
global offices gathered in Copenhagen for the purpose of
connecting, developing and experiencing NORDEN’s culture.
• As part of NORDEN’s efforts to engage in and contribute
to the local communities, we have introduced a Community
Engagement programme called Giving Together. Everyone in
NORDEN was invited to propose local charities and causes, on
which NORDEN can make a positive impact.
In total, NORDEN employees represented 48 different national-
ities in 2022, and the percentage of non-Danish employees has
risen to 54% from 50% in 2021.
NORDEN’s culture is a key driver to achieving success and deliv-
ering on our strategic ambitions. A value-driven culture helps
foster our purpose of enabling smarter global trade. Having a
strong culture that embraces market uncertainty through data-
driven decisions and risk monitoring is a key part of how we
achieve our results.
Diversity in management
Managerial levels range from the Board of Directors to Senior
Management to managers. The members of NORDEN’s Board of
Directors cover a wide range of competencies and experiences
within international shipping, finance, investment, strategy,
digitalisation and risk management, from both Danish and
international business. This combination is considered desir-
able as it ensures a broad approach to tasks and contributes to
ensuring qualified governance of NORDEN’s strategic direction.
Likewise, gender balance on a managerial level is desirable and
pursued on an ongoing basis in NORDEN, as part of ensuring a
diverse range of management skillsets and composition, while
promoting equal opportunity across NORDEN’s organisation.
NORDEN’s recruitment process enables managers to focus on
promoting equality and broadening opportunities for new and
existing talents. This includes looking for managerial candidates
with backgrounds other than shipping, and in addition actively
mitigating any potential biases that might influence the deci-
sion-making process when hiring. This is to ensure that NORDEN
recruits on the basis of qualifications, potential to develop and
ability to deliver on our strategy.
With an expanding organisation and new offices, it is vital to safe-
guard our strong, value-driven culture. To support this, our main
objectives are to retain and develop our employees, maintain a
high level of well-being and engagement, and to attract a diverse
range of new employees.
Diversity, equity and inclusion
As a people-based business, NORDEN considers diversity as a
strength in the world of shipping and actively works to ensure
DE&I in our organisation. We aim for an organisation, where
DE&I accelerates our purpose of enabling smarter global trade
through a diversity of gender, nationality, age, work experi-
ence, educational background and other attributes. We want to
achieve this by harnessing all employees’ unique contributions
into our operational foundation, while opening up for different
viewpoints and ways of thinking.
Creating a work environment where employees thrive and are
motivated is essential for sustaining long-term success.
2022 achievements and initiatives:
• To remain a value-driven company which challenges, develops
and empowers employees, NORDEN relaunched Soulship, our
global culture and development programme, offering training
within areas such as feedback, hybrid collaboration, energy
management, inclusion and how to have good conversations.
• Working with inclusion is an integrated part of NORDEN’s ESG
strategy and is measured through the Engagement Survey.
The survey showed an increase in the perceived inclusion in
NORDEN with focus on respect, trust, ability to raise discrimi-
nation concerns and the possibility to be yourself at work.
• Tracking employee engagement and well-being through
bi-annual Engagement Surveys. After each survey, team
sessions are conducted to ensure continuous improvement
both on group and team level. During 2022, we increased
our focus on employee well-being, introducing new health
and well-being initiatives and prioritising physical and mental
At NORDEN, we base all recruitment, promotion and rewarding
on qualifications, performance, potential and behaviour only and
we do not accept discrimination.
The gender balance in Executive Management and the Board of
Directors remained unchanged in 2022. On the Board of Direc-
tors, shareholder-elected women represented 33% (two out of
six) of the board members in 2022. The gender balance is there-
fore not yet meeting NORDEN's target of having a minimum of
40% shareholder-elected female board members in 2025. For
the Board of Directors to meet the objective on gender diversity,
the Board intends to propose female candidates at the Annual
NORDEN aims for a gender balance of a minimum of 40% of the
underrepresented gender, which leaves up to 20% flexibility for
women, men and non-binary genders, recognising that some
employees may not wish to be categorised.
