Employees

Meda’s continual aim is to maintain its strength as a small company by having a non-hierarchical organization with short decision-making paths and accelerated work processes. Joined with the resources of a large company, the result is a clear competitive advantage that ensures continual realization of key business opportunities.

Meda strongly values its dedicated and well-educated employees with extensive expertise within all its operations. As a specialty pharma company, most of Meda’s employees are active within sales and marketing. The roughly 1,600 persons within these areas represent more than 60% of total staff. At year-end 2009, Meda had 2,601 employees of whom 55% were women and 45% men.

In recent years, business operations and staff have grown quickly, particularly through acquisitions. In early 2005, Meda had about 150 employees, so the company multiplied over 17 times in five years. An important challenge in recent years has thus been integration of acquisitions and creation of a new, uniform Group and culture. To this end, Meda has developed increasing numbers of joint conditions and policies for the entire organization. The principle has been to use the best, most advantageous methods from all operations.

Working environment

Meda considers a safe, healthy working environment to be a necessity for all employees, and it strives to fully observe all applicable occupational health and safety legislation and regulations. Overall Group policy is implemented in detailed local working environment handbooks for countries in which Meda has a substantial number of employees—primarily in France, Germany, Sweden, and the US.

Equality and diversity

Meda’s explicit policy is to offer all employees and job applicants equal opportunities regardless of ethnicity, skin color, religion, gender, sexual preference, nationality, age, or physical or mental disability. The policy is clearly defined in Meda’s Business Conduct Guidelines.

Professional development

Employees’ dedication, participation, and loyalty are crucial for Meda’s future development. Consequently, a key factor for continued success is its structured professional development process. Besides salary terms and continuing education opportunities, Meda occasionally offers a share option plan to key employees.

Sick leave

In 2009, sick leave fell from 3.3 to 3.1%. Sick leave is relatively evenly split between women and men and among various age groups. As in previous years, most sick leave was short term. Consecutive sick leave exceeding 60 days represented 0.9%.