Responsible organisation

Becoming a leader among Europe’s most inclusive companies

Żabka is officially one of Europe’s most engaging companies. And, according to the Manager for Corporate Culture, Judyta Pastuszka, now it has also been recognised as one of the most inclusive.

‘We feature in the top third of the list of 850 companies that made it on to the Diversity Leaders 2024 ranking by the Financial Times and Statista, which involved a survey of more than 100,000 employees across 16 European countries’ she says. ‘And of the 19 Polish companies that made the list, we ranked fourth – comfortably inside the top 25%.’

An inclusive culture
This builds on the company’s achievement of becoming the first in Poland to obtain Equal-Salary certification that proves that we support and practice equal pay in the workplace. As Paweł Brzóskowski, Rewards Manager emphasis ‘Diversity and having an inclusive organisational culture are key strategic areas for us at Żabka, meaning our daily decisions are guided by an approach to equality that’s based on objective, fair and unbiased evaluation.’

This extends far beyond gender alone. ‘We have an ongoing commitment to ensuring that everybody feels respected and appreciated, regardless of their age, gender, family situation or economic stats,’ Paweł adds. ‘To make this happen, we operate a wide-ranging programme of courses and events, including quality-inclusive training for all employees, anti-discrimination webinars, and inclusive leadership training for male and female leaders.’

Increasing everybody’s potential
The company is also involved in several external initiatives, including the Diversity Charter – an initiative of Responsible Business Forum that we engaged to by committing to put in place equal treatment policy and diversity management, as well as proactively preventing discrimination and harassment in the workplace – and Target Gender Equity – programme to support the development of gender equality targets and action plans. As Judyta Pastuszka explains, ‘All these efforts are aimed at creating and sustaining an organisational culture that recognises and increases everybody’s potential, all while building an environment that’s based on collaboration and shared experience.’

This is a great honour to be included in Diversity Leaders 2024, but we are aware that there is still room for improvement. As Judyta adds, ‘Now we have a challenge to move further up the table in 2025 and during the years ahead: that’s in line with our determination to continue improving yet further in every aspect of diversity leadership.’

Measuring engagement and inclusivity across the group

According to Gallup Institute, our employee’s engagement level is five times higher than the average Polish company.

Behind our business success are several thousand committed employees, and franchisees. Together we have created an organisation based on standards of equal treatment and transparency, where every employee, co-worker and franchisee has equal opportunities and can openly talk about and implement their ideas. Achieving this requires an appreciation of many different needs and points of view, which is why we conduct the Gallup Q12 (measuring engagement level of employees) and Gallup Inclusion Index survey.

The Gallup questions are a framework for us to know how to create and improve our working environment. We analyse the data and prepare action plans to address issues that have impact on engagement and inclusion of our employees. As a result, we create a unique organisational culture, able to recognise the potential of everyone, while creating an environment for open collaboration and sharing experiences.

Transparent communication of our ESG progress

We comply with the best standards

To maintain the highest standards in the areas of food safety management, environmental management, occupational health and safety management and energy management, we have implemented and maintain standards consistent with ISO 22000 (since 2015), 14001 (since 2018), 45001 and 50001 (since 2019). The procedures and solutions implemented as part of the Integrated Management System guarantee our effectiveness in the areas covered by the standards mentioned above, which was confirmed in 2023 by over 70 internal audits and the re-extension of certificates by an accredited unit.

We expect our suppliers to implement and certify quality and food safety management systems. A business partner who has not implemented such a system or is a supplier of own brand products shall be qualified, in accordance with the Quality Qualification Manual in place, as a high-risk supplier and may cooperate with us only after undergoing a qualification audit whose assessment criteria are equivalent to the requirements of international standards for quality management and food safety. In the case of suppliers of own brand products who have implemented their own quality procedures, we shall audit their effectiveness before establishing a business relationship.

In 2023, we conducted 24 qualifications audits — 22 suppliers passed them successfully. We also periodically verify compliance with quality standards by means of announced and unannounced verification audits — in 2023, we carried out 95 audits of this nature. 10 suppliers were obliged to establish a remediation plan addressing the deficiencies identified. Those entities shall be subject to an audit ensuring that the corrective actions set out in the remediation plan have been implemented. We are also conducting qualification audits with regard to suppliers of producers’ brand products. The audit procedures revealed that 19 of them receive a positive result.

If any complaints are submitted or improper product quality is reported, we perform intervention audits at our business partners – in 2023, such audits accounted for 6,7% of all audits performed among suppliers of own brand products, and for 0,67% of audits conducted among suppliers of producers’ brand products. The introduction of additional controls is a response to the challenge of ensuring the highest quality of the food produced and is intended to reduce the number of recalls caused by quality defects. In 2023, we recorded 3 (dotyczące 4 produktów) such events — all of them related to producers’ brand products.

In our stores and distribution centres, we also maintained the Safety and Hygiene+ certification system which we created, as the first chain of stores, together with TÜV Nord Poland. The system covers also suppliers of our own labels and franchisees operating stores under the Żabka brand. During the verification process, such areas as approach to safety and hygiene management in production processes, organisation’s crisis management, requirements for subcontractors, infrastructure and the environment, are verified. Conformity assessment is performed by auditing documentation, as well as production and storage premises, in order to verify the implementation of processes and to introduce crisis management procedures. The level of the employees’ awareness and their attitude are evaluated as well. In 2023, such reassessment and certification were performed at 58 of our own brand suppliers.

To ensure that we properly secure data in the organization, we decided to implement the ISO 27001 standards – an international standard regarding the requirements for creating, maintaining and developing information security management systems. Being aware of the importance of the information used and processed by the Company, we implement organizational and technical safeguards to ensure its protection. At the same time, being open to new solutions, we believe that ISO27001 certification naturally fits into our company’s policy of maintaining credibility towards our clients, franchisees and contractors.