Merkle (formerly Namics) is a full-service digital agency with over 550 employees at six locations in Switzerland, Germany, and Serbia. When it comes to diversity management, the company participated, for example, in the “trans welcome” program of TGNS (Transgender Network Switzerland) for the inclusion of trans* people in the world of work.
As part of the pilot for the Toolkit: Women & Diversity in Innovation, one of Merkle’s goals is to optimize its internal “calibration process”, which incorporates objective performance criteria and multiple perspectives in promotion decisions. The resulting personnel structure is assessed at regular intervals using a comprehensive “diversity dashboard”. This is a monitoring tool that provides transparency on the distribution of key parameters such as part-time work or management responsibility linked to diversity characteristics such as gender, age, level of education, and origin. This identifies areas that require tangible action: for example, while the gender ratio among part-time employees is already fully balanced, there is currently still an imbalance in the distribution of management positions.
In the future, Merkle intends to form a diversely composed sounding board to involve people from as many different backgrounds as possible in discussions around organizational development and how to approach it. In the long term, the sounding board should contribute to an even stronger emphasis on diversity aspects in the calibration process and diversity dashboard.