Case study: How ASE promotes employee development

What are the material issues the company has identified?

In its 2017 Corporate Sustainability Report ASE identified a range of material issues, such as regulatory compliance, waste management, climate change, water resource management, employee health and safety. Among these, promoting employee development stands out as a key material issue for ASE.

Stakeholder engagement in accordance with the GRI Standards

The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) defines the Principle of Stakeholder Inclusiveness when identifying material issues (or a company’s most important impacts) as follows:

“The reporting organization shall identify its stakeholders, and explain how it has responded to their reasonable expectations and interests.”

Stakeholders must be consulted in the process of identifying a company’s most important impacts and their reasonable expectations and interests must be taken into account. This is an important cornerstone for CSR / sustainability reporting done responsibly.

Key stakeholder groups ASE engages with:

How stakeholder engagement was made to identify material issues

To identify and prioritise material topics ASE carried out a stakeholder survey, with 1,408 questionnaires completed to understand stakeholders’ level of concern for various topics.

What actions were taken by ASE to promote employee development?

In its 2017 Corporate Sustainability Report ASE reports that it took the following actions for promoting employee development:

• Implementing an Employee Career Development System
• In ASE, all facilities need to formulate the following year’s annual training and course programme, according to their own business and organisational needs and adapting to the framework of ASE’s Six-Path Employee Career Development System through four approaches: classroom training, online courses, on the job practice and external training. In 2017, ASE invested around US$2.07 million in employee development programmes, averaging about US$112 per employee. ASE also provide reimbursements for tuition expenses for employees pursuing an advanced degree in their field of work and, in 2017, 132 degrees were sponsored by the tuition reimbursement programme. ASE specially pays attention to the cultivation of internal lecturers, and continues to run the TTT (Train The Trainer) programme year by year. By the end of 2017, ASE had 3,909 internal lecturers and a total of 8,315,240 training hours were completed. The average hours of training and development courses offered was 121 hours per employee.

• Enhancing the effectiveness of training
• In 2017, to enhance the effectiveness of training, ASE launched the V-model training (a training to begin with the end in mind) in its China factories. A variety of approaches and teaching strategies were designed to achieve optimal results and the Kirkpatrick Model was taken into consideration in every step of the design planning, execution and measurement. Most importantly, training results were defined with measurable indicators, to make it possible for trainees to understand the training programmes’ objectives. Once the objectives were ascertained, it was possible to put together available resources to achieve the training purpose.

• Establishing the “Employee Development Dashboard”
• To ensure the continuous improvement of the Group’s overall competitiveness, ASE has established the “Employee Development Dashboard” since 2015 and uses the Kirkpatrick Model to measure the effectiveness of training indicators. The “Employee Care & Development Taskforce Team” of the ASE Corporate Sustainability Committee annually reviews the dashboard indicators at each site and, based on the dashboard performance, each site is required to establish improvement activities for employee training and development.

• Sharing best practices
• ASE organises internal HR seminars and invites university professors to speak at these events. At these seminars, participants contribute ideas and engage in discussions on plans and actions to promote ASE’s sustainable development. In 2017, ASE carried out two seminars on corporate sustainability and human resource improvement practices in Taiwan, and also held a V-Model training workshop in China.

Which GRI Standards and corresponding Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been addressed?

The GRI Standards addressed in this case are:

1) Disclosure 404-1 Average hours of training per year per employee

2) Disclosure 404-2 Programs for upgrading employee skills and transition assistance programs

Disclosure 404-1 Average hours of training per year per employee corresponds to:

• Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4: Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all
• Business theme: Employee training and education
• Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls
• Business theme: Gender equality
• Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 8: Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all
• Business theme: Employee training and education

Disclosure 404-2 Programs for upgrading employee skills and transition assistance programs corresponds to:

• Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 8: Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all
• Business theme: Employee training and education

78% of the world’s 250 largest companies report in accordance with the GRI Standards

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References:

1) This case study is based on published information by ASE, located at the link below. For the sake of readability, we did not use brackets or ellipses. However, we made sure that the extra or missing words did not change the report’s meaning. If you would like to quote these written sources from the original, please revert to the original on the Global Reporting Initiative’s Sustainability Disclosure Database at the link:

http://database.globalreporting.org/

2) https://www.globalreporting.org/standards/gri-standards-download-center/

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