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Sustainable Development

Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is a critical component of our business strategy and performance. By engaging with our employees we build trust and create a working environment in which employees know their contribution is valued. Engaged people want to continue to be a part of the company, to go above and beyond to satisfy customers and achieve performance targets. As a consequence, they deliver better business results.

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At CEMEX, we engage our employees on topics ranging from ethics to innovation to operations in order to earn their trust, foster the exchange of ideas, and improve our performance. In addition, we continually focus on improving our work environment. To effectively target our efforts, we conduct our CEMEX survey worldwide.

Because CEMEX is a global and diverse company, our engagement efforts are vital to increasing our understanding of sustainability challenges and opportunities within our business, and we use these insights in our ongoing effort to be an employer of choice.

Our CEMEX Survey provides a forum for employees to share their opinions, and its results give us a representative view of what matters the most to our people. Our goal is to achieve high engagement levels in each country in which we operate, compared with industry benchmarks. In addition to our internal employee survey, our employees share their ideas and perceptions through regular "town-hall" style meetings and ongoing team briefings. More importantly, this feedback guides our actions to continuously improve our workplace.

As part of the ongoing efforts to support our employees, we have in place arrangements that allow them to balance work with other commitments, and we encourage employee volunteering opportunities.


At CEMEX, we want to be the world's most efficient and profitable building materials company. While we know we have a solid business strategy, the ultimate determinant of our company's success is our people. As such, their opinions on a range of issues, from their individual likes and dislikes to the direction of our company as a whole, are important to our ability to achieve our business goals.

Since 2006, we have conducted our CEMEX employee survey globally. The survey measures the degree to which employees feel motivated by their job, supervisors, team, and organization to stay with the company and contribute to its success. Guided by the results, segmented by business unit and functional areas, our business leaders and department heads have developed action plans and implemented initiatives that improve the work life and performance of our employees.

Among the additional improvements noticed from 2007 to 2009, people have:

  • acknowledged CEMEX is acting as a more socially responsible company
  • appreciated that they have been receiving better communication and feedback, and recognized that top management is actively providing direction that enables them to better understand our mission
  • expressed confidence that we will outperform our competitors in the future and in the decisions made by top management

Our Leadership Communication Process is an excellent example of how we are listening to our employees and responding to their needs. The needs identified in our 2007 employee survey included the improvement of internal communication practices and having CEMEX managers in leadership roles closer to the line. In response, a multicultural and multifunctional team worked together to create a Leadership Communication Process that defines the key role that our leaders play in employee communication and engagement.

The Leadership Communication Process has three main components:

  • minimum core requirements for actively communicating with employees at each level within the organization to better inform and engage our people
  • processes for timely communication of relevant strategic business topics
  • mechanisms that ensure employees are given multiple opportunities to provide feedback or address questions to management, ensuring dynamic, two-way communications with our people

To equip all CEMEX managers to better manage communication, we have an online and easy-to-use tool kit that allows managers to review best practices, tools, and tips for communicating with employees.

We believe that from our headquarters to the front-lines, all employees can create sustainable value for the company regardless of their position. For our sustainability strategy to be effective, however, employees must understand how and why sustainability matters so that they can incorporate it into their daily activities. Towards these ends, we have developed a suite of internal communications materials to help managers and employees understand what sustainability means at CEMEX and their role in identifying and implementing plans for us become more sustainable both locally and globally.

Executives across business units and regions actively participated in the sustainability communications rollout by holding their teams accountable for completing team sustainability discussions, sending a clear message that sustainability is a process of continuous improvement and is vital to our business success.

Read our Croatia communications case