Passion for the business

Our people are truly proud of our brands and products. The passion for our business can be seen also in our Employee Engagement Survey, Pulse Meter. In 2009, we reached an all time high response rate of 80 percent. Also, the results were encouraging, showing improvements in the majority of our businesses.

For Amer Sports overall, our people rated highest the Employee Engagement, Performance Management, Growth & Development, and “My Manager” dimensions. On the basis of the survey, 76 percent of our employees are extremely satisfied with the company as an employer.

The Pulse Meter is conducted regularly in Amer Sports. It strengthens organizational dialog and gives input to organizational and people development actions.

Great leaders enable success

We expect our leaders to lead by example and create a company culture that through passion and professionalism drives business success. We emphasize the importance of talent management as a philosophy that covers the whole company. Our talent management process is also linked to our performance management model. In 2009, we renewed our talent management model to better focus on successor planning and building the leadership pipeline. We also focused on defining the leadership competencies of Amer Sports. The leadership competencies will be utilized in leadership development, for example in a 360 feedback process. Leadership development continues in 2010 on the basis of the needs of the business.

Strong performance culture through Coaching for Success Performance management is our key management process to impact on the motivation and performance of our people. We believe in people development which is based on continuous cooperation, commitment, and constructive dialog. Therefore performance management at Amer Sports is called ”Coaching for Success”. Coaching for Success was launched globally in 2008 and the first experiences from 2009 were positive. The model supports the achievement of company goals. On the basis of our employee engagement survey, 74 percent of our employees say that they can see a clear link between their work and company objectives.

In 2009, we continued to develop the model further, introducing competence profiles and providing further support for managers when discussing performance with their employees.

Reward for results

We want to ensure that our people are rewarded for the results they achieve through their passion and professionalism to their work. We strongly believe in rewarding good and excellent performance, and have therefore developed our total reward strategy to support the implementation of business strategy and to encourage excellent performance. In 2009, we continued with the global development and implementation of the pay for performance philosophy and worked on further providing guidance to our managers in discussing pay for performance with employees and enhancing employee communication.

We continue to focus on team and individual accountability. During 2009, we developed the basic principles of our annual incentive programs for our platforms and are now ensuring that each individual has the possibility to be rewarded for the work they perform in their area of responsibility whilst ensuring the company is achieving its financial targets.

As we believe that proud people perform, we also need to ensure that our reward philosophy is competitive and our people are retained.

Strengthened Human Resources partnership The Human Resources function at Amer Sports focuses on supporting integration and strategic platforms as well as ensuring professional and effective management of employee relations. Hence, the Amer Sports Human Resources Mission is:

“We partner proactively with our leaders to attract, retain, develop, and motivate our employees, and to create a high performing working culture. We enable business success.”

In 2009, the Global Human Resources Network was strengthened by a renewed operational model. The operational model consists of a regular meeting cycle, common People Key Performance Indicators, and clarified Human Resources responsibilities. The purpose is to add value to local level people management by focusing needed people management actions, to share information on people matters to support decision making, and to strengthen the common way of working.

At Amer Sports, we aim to ensure that we have the right people in the right places in the right roles. As our people move within the company, we want them all to be treated fairly and professionally.

Based on the Amer Sports integration strategy, inter-company transfers as well as job rotation are encouraged to maximize our internal talent potential. We prefer an internal candidate whenever appropriate and when the role requirements are met.

Through our People Strategy we aim to ensure that our business is successful today as well as in the future.