Novo Nordisk Overview

Many elements, one direction

Our culture is built on collaboration between people, departments, functions and the surrounding society – it's how we generate sustainable results, and why we have an exceptional level of engagement and retention among existing employees.

At Novo Nordisk, we have clearly defined values. One of these is to be ambitious. This means you should always strive to become better at what you do. We give our employees the greatest freedom to manage and drive their career: to work at Novo Nordisk it is important that you can think and act for yourself.

Our working environment is a transparent one. Across departments and hierarchy we share information, reasoning and processes because we are all working towards the same goal: to change the lives of people within our focused disease states.

This success means our shareholders are happy, our stakeholders are happy and the local communities that we give back to embrace our commitment to the environment and the mark we leave on their neighborhood.

That's the Novo Nordisk way. That's why our careers are life-changing careers.

Prioritizing the right balance

In addition to having a career with a global impact, you can be sure that we are working to ensure a natural balance between work and leisure time.

As more people find that the boundaries between work and leisure are increasingly dissolving, we have introduced flexitime arrangements in many places, including the opportunity to work from home via an ADSL connection – which we pay for. Flexitime can be an essential advantage, especially if you have children.

Novo Nordisk considers it important to make sure that our employees stay fit and healthy. Our NovoHealth programme helps our employees adopt and maintain a healthy lifestyle while working for Novo Nordisk. At many of our locations we have leisure centres and organise physical activities. The centres are staffed with instructors who can help set up personal programmes.

No boundaries

Career development is essential to sustaining growth while improving quality. Our employees typically attend two target appraisals a year, where along with their managers they define a preferred career path and set the goals for achieving it. The appraisal puts career direction in the hands of the employee, and allows them to define the actions required to reach those goals – including the support expected from the manager.

We believe that clear goals followed up with individual feedback are the best conditions for developing a life-changing career, to the benefit of both the employee and Novo Nordisk. But as well as working hard to provide opportunities and benefits for existing employees, we also see the need for fresh talent, and always look forward to welcoming people who can bring new energy and perspective to our mission.

Employee development

In order to ensure that you can constantly develop your skills and knowledge, we at Novo Nordisk invest a good part of our turnover in supplementary training. Every year, we spend more than DKK 150 million on training courses for employees so that they can develop both professionally and personally.

In addition to learning through courses, you will have plenty of opportunities for on-the-job training. We believe that experience from your job makes an important contribution to learning. Moreover, you will continuously receive new input from the seminars, conferences and workshops that we arrange and take part in.

In order to ensure the highest quality of our in-house training programme, participants are asked to evaluate the teaching they have received at the end of every completed course.

NovoHealth

We believe that healthy employees create a healthy company, that's why we have NovoHealth: our worldwide employee health programme striving to provide a workplace that promotes and supports healthy living for all employees. NovoHealth focuses on providing healthy food and beverages to our employees; offers access to regular health checks; access and encouragement to take part in physical activities and as well as providing a smoke-fee workplace also provides guidance and support to employees who wish to stop smoking.

The NovoHealth programme is part of our commitment to life-changing careers.

Our reputation from the inside

The employees' opinion about the reputation of Novo Nordisk is measured every year in an online survey. In the survey, reputation is measured on various parameters such as social responsibility, emotional appeal, products and services, vision and management, financial results and work environment.

The latest survey (in the autumn of 2006) was carried out among Novo Nordisk's employees in Denmark, England, China, US and Germany. Around 2,800 employees took the time to answer a web-based questionnaire.

On a scale from 1-100, where 100 is the best, the employees give Novo Nordisk a total score of 83.5 on average across the countries. A score above 80 is considered 'excellent', it's the platform of a life-changing career.

Our reputation from the outside

Novo Nordisk has the stated aim of attracting and retaining the very best employees. However, we also place great emphasis on your having the right personal qualities as a colleague and partner.

We maintain a professionally strong environment, with more than 300 PhDs in research and development. Our researchers benefit from our professional reputation with recognised research institutions and interesting organisations in many different countries. Moreover, our research and development departments enjoy close working partnerships with universities and other higher education establishments both in Denmark and abroad.

We invest a great deal in helping employees acquire knowledge through supplementary training. Similarly, we provide plenty of opportunities to participate in academic debate, such as the chance to publish your findings – in the form of research results, for instance – that you have achieved on your own or in collaboration with others.