Employee Experience

Management Approach

At Lilly, we make life better for people around the world – and it starts with our employees. Through our diverse, comprehensive pay and benefits programs – many at the forefront of the marketplace – as well as enrichment through learning and development opportunities, we empower our colleagues to live their best lives. We also strive to create a companywide culture where best-in-class safety practices support the well-being of our workforce and the communities where we operate. In caring for Team Lilly, we power our purpose.

Healthy Workplace and Physical Wellness

• At our Indianapolis headquarters, we offer two on-site medical clinics where employees are encouraged to access annual preventive screenings and routine lab work.

• New mothers receive maternity leave benefits and access to lactation rooms, and all new adoptive, foster and birth parents are eligible for ten weeks of paid time off. Our corporate headquarters has two on-site child development centers, and we offer back-up care options and parenting education opportunities.

• Fitness centers at our Indianapolis headquarters offer individual and group exercise as well as showers and bike racks for those who commute to work by bicycle. We provide access to a virtual fitness benefit and a national network of more than 10,000 fitness centers located across the U.S. at no additional cost to our employees and their eligible family members.

• Employees have access to a dietitian for personal consultation and can enjoy healthy dining choices and snacks on campus.

Behavioral Health

• Health, above all, includes mental health. We offer an Employee Assistance Program (EAP) at no additional cost to help with the stresses and challenges of life. Employees in the U.S. can talk to counselors and specialists to help with self-care and care for their families through EAP or an in-person or virtual visit with our Indianapolis-based dedicated mental health clinician.

• Employees are invited to webinars covering topics such as Science of Care, Getting Better Sleep, Preventing Burnout and Being Purpose Driven to help manage stress, anxiety and challenges they are facing. meQuillibrium, a digital engagement platform, is available for employees who wish to learn resilience skills to manage stressful times through mindfulness, meditation and self-compassion.

• Our Mental Health Advocacy training program, offered in partnership with our EAP provider and our EnAbleUS employee resource group, offers resources to help employees recognize the signs of emotional stress and to empower them to seek appropriate care.

Financial Literacy

• We promote financial well-being through a variety of online financial resources, and we offer individual financial counseling at no out-of-pocket cost to our employees.

Many of our benefits also are available to spouses, domestic partners and eligible dependents to promote well-being for the entire family. Additionally, Lilly affiliate sites around the world offer extensive wellness programs aimed at providing a holistic approach to employee health, safety and well-being.

Pay & Benefits

Our pay and benefits programs are designed to attract and retain a diverse, highly motivated workforce while reinforcing our care for employees and shared purpose to make life better. Lilly’s compensation programs reward employee contributions and overall business success, and our benefit programs provide the flexibility to meet employees where they are in life and support overall well-being. We strive to deliver our total rewards with a global mindset, differentiating programs only where local business needs or markets necessitate.

We are committed to ensuring pay equity for all employees. For more than 20 years, we have regularly conducted pay equity studies of our workforce in the U.S. and have more recently started conducting studies of our workforce outside of the U.S. While infrequent, we have made pay adjustments as warranted based on these analyses. We believe that pay equity is critical to our success in supporting a global, diverse and inclusive workforce.

While our programs vary around the world, we take a holistic approach to employee benefits. These may include flexible work arrangements; on-site conveniences such as cafes, fitness centers and child development centers; competitive time-off programs including two company shutdown periods in the U.S. to encourage employees to fully disconnect; retirement benefits including pension and retiree health care benefits in some countries; and health and disability programs that are available to eligible employees when they need support.

We emphasize diversity, equity and inclusion in our global benefits programs. We have worked locally in our international affiliates to remove certain exclusions as a part of our commitment to support a global standard of care. Examples include eliminating barriers to coverage for same sex partners, newborn babies, certain sexually transmitted diseases, suicide and self-inflicted injury. In the U.S., we partner with Included Health to offer concierge health care navigation to our LGBTQ+ community and with Progyny to support employees through their personal family-building journeys including fertility, adoption and surrogacy benefits. Our time-off programs also recognize a modernized definition of family to ensure employees may care for loved ones.

We also offer Inspire, an employee recognition program to reward and recognize employees at Lilly locations globally. The program includes supervisor-to-employee, peer-to-peer and years-of-service recognition. Employees may recognize colleagues and congratulate and support coworkers’ successes through the company-wide recognition feed, providing a consistent and meaningful recognition experience for all employees.

Learn more about our approach to DEI and how we’re working to make employee health care more affordable in the U.S.

Learning & Development Programs & Tools

Career Development & On-Demand Learning

Explore Your Career is Lilly’s global framework and suite of resources designed to help employees grow and lead every day – and to help engage and retain talent. Explore Your Career provides the opportunity for employees to “raise their hand” to receive a talent assessment, which provides development suggestions for deepening skills and taking on new or expanded leadership roles. Explore Your Career contains tools and guidance for employees and their managers to assess career interests, map career plans and develop capabilities. More than 10,000 employees have engaged in the program during the first three years of availability, signaling a healthy interest in career development. The program also shows encouraging results at the enterprise level, including improved engagement scores, improved retention rates for those who participate and positive perceptions of career development and investment.

LillyU, which features the online LinkedIn Learning platform, is another opportunity extended to all employees. Lilly employees are curious innovators and love to learn. LinkedIn Learning courses are taught by real-world practitioners around the globe who inspire and engage learners in several languages, including English, Spanish, German, French, Japanese, Mandarin and Brazilian Portuguese. This makes it widely accessible to Lilly’s global team of employees in an on-demand, learn-anywhere and -anytime format. The platform provides relevant, contemporary learning opportunities across business, creative and technology topics.

Data Analytics & Technology

Lilly has prioritized strengthening our data skills and capabilities. The Lilly Data and Analytics Institute was launched to upskill employees and leaders across the company. Through foundational courses, custom scenario-based simulations and hands-on tool-based programs, Lilly is deepening its culture of data-driven decision making and equipping employees and leaders alike to tap more deeply into the power of analytics.

In 2021, Lilly launched an advancement in its employee development, inclusion and engagement through a new global virtual platform, ELEVATE, designed to help all employees learn how to leverage technology to build connections and performance across the Lilly enterprise. ELEVATE programming, continued in 2022, demonstrates how to use available tools and resources to improve productivity, collaboration, inclusivity and well-being for employees who work on site or remotely.

Leadership Development

Effective leadership is a critically important part of a thriving organization. In recent years we’ve expanded our investment in leadership development programs, tools and resources for leaders at all levels of the company and across the globe. The aim is to help supervisors develop skills and strategies to lead increasingly inclusive, collaborative and high-performing teams.

In addition to the online LinkedIn Learning platform available in multiple languages, we have further expanded our instructor-led offerings to target leadership development and skill-building. Our REACH Leadership Development programs have been expanded in 2022 to impact more leaders globally, with both company strategy and skill-building content. Additional initiatives have included training on inclusive leadership in a hybrid environment, a “Take the Lead” live webinar series delivered by Lilly executives to all leaders, and quarterly learning labs available for leadership skill-building on topics such as inspiring teams and retaining and developing talent.

Results of this comprehensive leadership development agenda continue to be positive, with employees rating managers with increasingly favorable scores on multiple leadership dimensions in Lilly’s annual leadership survey from 2019-2022.

Specialized Development Programs

We develop talent from diverse backgrounds through several signature programs. Emerge, a three-day program led by our CEO, is designed to further develop senior-level, historically underrepresented talent at Lilly. Black, Latinx, Asian, and LGBTQ+ cohorts have participated in this enterprise-level program since its inception. In 2022 we introduced a Minority Leader Retreat series for mid-level minority group member leaders, as well as Propel, a program for Black, Latinx, Asian, and LGBTQ+ individual contributors newer to Lilly who are interested in investing in their career development. Lilly also continues to offer established leadership development programs for women and multicultural talent who are newer to leadership, as well as leaders at all levels.

Inclusive Training Approaches

In addition to providing numerous learning programs across an array of topics, we continue to evolve design standards for training courses to improve accessibility for people living and working with disabilities and other access needs. Examples include ensuring courses are compatible with assistive technologies such as screen readers for employees with visual impairments and providing transcripts for individuals with hearing impairments. Across Lilly, we intentionally design learning experiences and other communications technologies to be more inclusive.

Recruiting & Retaining Top Talent

We believe cultivating talent begins with the talent acquisition and hiring process and continues through education, development and advancement of people with wide-ranging backgrounds and experiences.

We strive to find top talent, with a focus on diversity, but always ensuring the best candidate is hired for each job. We need to be innovative in how we access and develop key talent. For example, Lilly Research Labs offers several programs that focus on individuals at different points in their career, including:

• Accelerated R&D Leadership Program: A two-year rotation program launched in 2019 to bring in MD/MBA and Ph.D./MBA talent from highly regarded MBA schools who have the passion to lead at the intersection of business and science. Program participant Christalyn Rhodes shares her story.

• Postdoctoral scientist program: Through this initiative, Lilly hired 54 postdoctoral scientists in 2022. Positions include mentorship by senior scientists throughout LRL.

• Medicines Innovation Hub Talent Development Academy: A set of programs focused on scientific talent recruitment and development that includes early career scientists, potential leaders and experienced scientists for rotations within the organization.

In recent years we have also developed programs specifically targeted at employee retention.

In 2021, we began the process of further upskilling our HR partners to assist in education efforts of employees and managers around retention. The Science of Retention series focuses on three main areas: the psychology of retention and helping employees choose to stay; the leading and lagging indicators of retention and what to do about each; and how to bolster employee engagement. We developed a resource called the Engagement Conversation Toolkit, which is an easy-to-use handbook managers can use to conduct frequent “stay interviews.” These conversations are meant to identify barriers for employee retention that are specific to the individual so that the manager can promptly and more effectively address any underlying or ongoing circumstances that may be causing challenges for the employee.

Explore Your Career, our global framework and suite of resources noted above, helps drive retention through extensive career learning and development opportunities. Additionally, to support career progression, we recently realigned job titles and added levels within our career paths to provide more opportunities.

In early 2022, we launched Discover, a 12-month new employee onboarding program in the U.S. The program has multiple touchpoints designed to foster integration into the Lilly culture, accelerate learning and to create connections that further a sense of belonging at Lilly.

Attrition Rate

Lilly’s 2022 voluntary attrition rate was 8.9%, with an involuntary rate of 1.2%, for a total attrition rate of 10%. Total attrition decreased from the previous year, and we have consistently remained below industry averages.

Employee Engagement

Our quarterly employee engagement survey, the Pulse survey, has been administered in some form since 1995. Currently each quarter, 25% of global employees are randomly invited to participate in the Pulse survey.

Our most recent survey in 2022 asked employees more than 90 questions related to meaningful work, rewards and recognition, well-being, job satisfaction and retention. The Pulse survey evaluates employee perceptions of 13 different dimensions, including engagement, which is a composite dimension of several questions.

Over the past four years, our response rate has been between 60-70%, with more than 22,000 employees responding to the survey in 2022, which is available in 19 languages. During 2021, we also added a Micro-Pulse survey, which was administered to small, randomized groups of 500-5,000 employees and further tested just-in-time concepts, such as preferences of working on-site versus remote, facilities, benefits and communication strategies. This continues to be a key platform to listen to employees and ensure their voices are heard. The most recent Micro-Pulse survey was administered in late 2022 and listened to employee’s perceptions about current work environment trends.

Employee Safety

Keeping our people safe and healthy, whether at home or at work, is a top priority and aligns directly with our values. We realize the journey toward excellence in safety never ends, and we are constantly evaluating approaches to improve our safety programs and integrate injury prevention into everyday work.

We focus on creating a companywide culture where best-in-class safety practices are consistently followed. To do this, we assess and continuously strive to improve our safety performance to promote the well-being of employees and to help safeguard communities where we operate.

All employees are required to complete routine training on health, safety and environmental programs. This includes general health, safety and environmental training, as well as training on industry-specific and job-specific programs and procedures. Employees are also trained on relevant emergency preparedness and response procedures.

Our Lilly Technology Center in Indianapolis, Indiana has been a participant in the OSHA Voluntary Protection Program (VPP) since 2001 and has achieved the STAR certification. Lilly’s Technology Center is our largest manufacturing footprint with more than 5,000 employees. The Voluntary Protection Programs (VPP) recognize employers and workers who have implemented effective safety and health management systems and maintain injury and illness rates below national Bureau of Labor Statistics averages for their respective industries. To be recognized in the STAR program specifically, employers and employees must demonstrate exemplary achievement in the development, implementation, and continuous improvement of their safety and health management system.

At Lilly, we measure both leading and lagging indicators when assessing our overall safety performance. We have found that tracking leading – or predictive – indicators, such as ergonomic risk, safety culture scores and precursors for life-altering and fatality risks, contributes greatly to our company safety performance. Using these indicators in conjunction with lagging indicators, such as our injury rates, we can paint a comprehensive picture of the areas that most affect employee safety across Lilly. This approach allows us to both influence change where needed and track our safety progress in concrete ways over time.

Employee Safety Goals

Since we first began setting global safety goals in 2007, we have achieved significant improvements in our injury and illness rates. We continue to evaluate and set challenging employee safety goals to ensure we are making improvements in the most impactful areas.

Lilly has established safety metrics connected to our safety priorities and improving safety culture. Our priorities include developing safety leadership capabilities, reducing our most significant risks that could have life-altering or fatal consequences and managing business continuity risks, including those associated with process safety management. Additionally, we established a safety goal – to achieve zero severe injuries – with a focus on continuous improvement. In 2022, our severe injury rate was 0.55 injuries per 500 employees, which represents an increase over the 2021 rate of 0.41. This increase was primarily driven by a higher number of injuries related to ergonomics and motor vehicle collisions. Some of the increase in severe injuries from 2021 to 2022 are likely attributed to more onsite and field-based activity post-pandemic. We strive to achieve continuous improvement in this performance as we work toward achieving an injury-free workplace.

With an eye on predictive indicators to improve our safety performance and culture, we track several leading metrics aligned with our priorities:

• Life-Altering Injury and Fatality Near Miss Rate – Near miss events that involve the potential to result in a life-altering injury and fatality.

• Safety Leadership Score – Safety culture score calculated from our global employee Pulse surveys.

• Lab Inspections – Execution of lab inspections in Lilly Research Laboratories to help drive leadership engagement and identify and mitigate risks.

• Affiliate Field Safety Discussions – A requirement for leaders to engage in driving and ergonomic safety discussions with our field-based employees.

We continue to track and report injuries as required by local regulations (e.g., OSHA); however, for internally tracked injury metrics, we utilize the severe injury rate metric, which is based on the ASTM Standard for Reporting Injuries and Illnesses. This metric is applied globally and provides insights into our safety program performance. We also track the number of process safety deviations in our applicable manufacturing sites and the number of life-altering injuries and fatalities globally.

Lilly’s Safety Progress and Performance

View Lilly’s historical safety measurements and data from 2015-2021 in our 2021 ESG Report. Additional historical data can be found in our reporting archives.

See important information about our ESG report.