About Our Employees

When you invest in your employees, they invest in you. At HARMAN, we believe that the people we work and partner with are the key to our success, and we continually strive to promote and expand their personal and professional success. We encourage the development and growth of our employees through a variety of platforms, including formal training, meaningful roles, and challenging opportunities.

HARMAN University, our comprehensive online and location-based learning resource, is designed to develop leadership, business, functional, and technical skills to further stimulate a learning culture and provide opportunities for professional growth, ultimately making our company stronger and more successful. This platform launched in the summer of 2016 and was responsible for the effective training of nearly 17,500 worldwide professional employees in 2017, or 92 percent of this audience, averaging 15.2 training hours per employee, per year. In parallel, dedicated local teams drove skills training for employees in manufacturing sites.

In the words of our President and Chief Executive Officer, Dinesh Paliwal, "HARMAN is committed to accountability, transparency and doing what is right.” To reinforce our values and educate employees about compliance requirements and our Code of Conduct, HARMAN requires completion of Compliance Training. This sends a message to our people, our customers and our partners that we are dedicated to operation at the highest ethical standards in every aspect of our business all around the world.​ Organized around various topics, including anti-harassment, export controls, and practicing effective cybersecurity, HARMAN's compliance training program helps HARMAN become a role model in our industry.

Compliance and ethical behavior courses are offered in 11 languages and rotated annually, and every year we launch a new campaign to existing and new employees. In 2017, we trained our target audience of 15,000 employees, or half of our workforce (specialist-level and above) in five critical topics, reaching a 100 percent completion rating in most sites. Besides this campaign, other state- or country-mandated courses were completed by the target audience.

A well-informed workforce is only part of our goal. We continually invest in the development of our employees and encourage them to broaden their capabilities through our feedback and talent management systems:

• HARMAN’s People Cycle provides an established process that aligns individual targets/development plans with key business goals and encourages continuous feedback.
• Our online talent management system enables employees to continuously track their performance and provides our leadership team with valuable data that informs decisions regarding learning needs and succession management.

Fostering a diverse and inclusive working environment is imperative to our culture, our business, and our innovation. We have always believed that our success and sustainability is strengthened by all dimensions of diversity, which is why we maintain an unwavering commitment to promoting a work environment where all individuals are respected and valued.

HARMAN Diversity and Inclusion Framework

We have designed a pillar-based framework that we have adopted throughout HARMAN, enabling us to turn our Diversity and Inclusion objectives into achievable outcomes. In support of our objectives, we have development programs that build awareness and reframe mindsets to help further foster a culture of inclusion.

At HARMAN, we recognize the criticality of having diversity at all levels of our organization. We conduct continuous engagement activities to champion and empower our workforce, including guest speakers, Unconscious Bias Sessions, mentorship programs, female-focused learning activities and inclusive networking events.

In 2017, we continued our commitment to equal opportunity and women’s leadership through the HARMAN Women’s Network, a voluntary business resource group led by women, for women. We have mobilized local chapters of our business resource group, the HARMAN Women’s Network, in 28 locations across 15 countries to accelerate our goal of greater gender parity in leadership roles by 2025. Our mission is to evolve HARMAN as the employer of choice for women who are passionate about superior performance and authenticity as we consistently strive to attract, develop and retain successful women across the company.

Since its inception in 2015, the success of the HARMAN Women’s Network has exceeded our goal of improved diversity, inclusivity and continuous improvement, including:

1. Internal and external engagement activities with key partners and thought-leaders
2. Investment in diversity initiatives and external partnerships
3. Deployment of a global roadmap of critical interventions to enhance gender parity in our pipeline, increase learning opportunities for women, and to influence global policies that will create an environment that supports women in all stages of their career
4. Women’s Leadership Summits across the globe including male and female leaders coming together to create action plans for their respective locations. The goal of the summits is to help accelerate our path to gender equality through education, awareness building and critical interventions
5. Emphasized importance of workplace inclusion through annual Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day celebrations

We’re proud of our dedication to the success of our employees and continue to feel the impact of our investment. As of December 2017, we employed approximately 30,000 valued individuals worldwide.

Increasing our workforce by 13 percent from the previous fiscal year, female representation remains flat at 33.4 percent. With an aggressive focus in diversity hiring, the distribution of female hires is at 37.4 percent. We remain determined to change the diversity landscape, which can be attained when hiring rates outpace the representation distribution. HARMAN prospers from having a multi-generational workforce which provides a range of skills and talent that allows for a more effective and productive workplace. With mentoring relationships and valuing diversity of thought, we bring innovation and career satisfaction to life. For more information on workforce metrics, please see the Key Data Summary.

No matter what we do or where we work, safety is our priority. At HARMAN, we work hard to ensure a safe and secure working environment that promotes physical and mental wellbeing for all employees. We acknowledge that the sustainability of our business is directly reliant on our greatest assets: the people we employ and our valued customers.

Whether it’s completing global health and safety audits or monitoring compliance metrics, safety is embedded within all stages of our operations. We regularly monitor non-conformance areas and opportunities for safety process improvement and strive to ensure that all employees receive adequate training on health and safety.

HARMAN maintains health, safety, and wellness committees throughout all of our global manufacturing locations to support and provide positive, safe workplaces. Committees are comprised of site managers and operations personnel whose responsibilities vary by location and division and are guided by local labor regulations and requirements.

Over 1,000 employees participate in formal health and safety committees, representing nearly eight percent of our total manufacturing workforce worldwide.

Of the ten HARMAN facilities that have formal agreements with trade unions, the Querétaro and Germany facilities’ collective bargaining agreements include health and safety topics related to the working environment (sexual harassment, working hours, etc.) and applicable regulations. In Querétaro, 47 percent of employees are covered by a collective bargaining agreement, while 80 percent of employees in Germany are part of the trade union.

Our commitment to safe business practices does not go unnoticed. We are proud that our recordable incident rate decreased by one percent, and lost work day case rate decreased by 12 percent. We continue to evolve our policies, practices, trainings, and programs and strive to improve our safety performance at every opportunity.

Due to the variety of our products and scale of their applications, we recognize that our health and safety commitment cannot be limited to just our employees. We are equally dedicated to the health and safety of our customers, which is embedded in our responsibility for the products we produce and our official policies which meet rigorous industry and regulatory standards. Our management approach to health and safety is embedded in our TS 16949 (quality management system) and ISO 14001 (environmental management system), and includes elements of OSHAS 18001.

The following facilities are ISO certified:

HARMAN’s environmental, health and safety programs provide a sustainable framework for our operations and allow us to make sound decisions in response to internal and external health and safety factors. We have key processes in place to implement plans, monitor action and review management of operations to ensure compliance with relevant standards within and outside the organization.

To further demonstrate our commitment to safety, we focused our efforts successfully to achieve the Internationally Recognized Certification with Automotive Safety Integrity Level ASIL “D”. This ISO 26262 certification is the international standard that governs functional safety in the automotive industry commissioned by TüV SüD, Product Service GmbH - an independent, internationally accredited certification company. Compliance to ISO 26262 is critical for the safety of connected vehicles and addresses the possible hazards caused by malfunctioned behavior of electrical and/or electronic (E/E) safety related systems and their interactions. As a recognized leader of safety and security in connected vehicles, this certification further validates HARMAN’s emphasis on safety at the forefront of innovation throughout the entire automotive technology lifecycle.