Welcome to Partners Group's annual corporate sustainability update, and thank you for joining us today. My name is André Frei, and I'm hosting this call as Partners Group's Chairman of Sustainability. We're excited to share highlights from our recently published corporate sustainability report with you today. I hope you had a chance to have a look at it. I believe it provides a very comprehensive overview of our environmental, social, and governance ESG performance across our investment portfolio and at corporate level in 2021. 2021 was an active and important year in Partners Group sustainability journey. After many years of implementing many fold initiatives, 2021 was the year where we consolidated our efforts into one overarching sustainability strategy. The strategy really combines our existing frameworks around ESG and sustainability with a roadmap for the next phase of Partners Group.
It articulates our vision of creating positive and lasting impact for all our stakeholders at corporate level, and our vision of building better and more sustainable assets and companies at portfolio level. In the next 30-45 minutes, I will first talk you through our sustainability strategy. My colleague, Carmela Mondino, Head of ESG, will present ESG achievements, but also challenges from our portfolio last year. She will be joined by Sujit John, a Managing Director in our Private Equity Health & Life vertical, who will present an ESG case study to us. After that, Kirsta Anderson, our Chief People Officer, will talk about the social dimension of ESG at corporate level. As always, we will end today's call with a Q&A session. I look forward to your questions later on. Let us move to slide 4.
Many of you know that Partners Group has a long history of responsible investing. If you know Partners Group well, you know that sustainability is really important for us as a leading private markets investment manager. That is why oversight for sustainability topics lies with the most senior levels of our organization. Our board of directors is actually responsible for Partners Group's sustainability strategy, including oversight. Our executive team is responsible for implementing the sustainability strategy. Amongst others, they define and control sustainability related roles and goals. As Chairman of Sustainability, it's my role to collaborate closely with the executive team and Carmela as Head of ESG to drive forward the sustainability strategy at firm and portfolio level. Our ESG team develops and implements operational governance and control frameworks. They also advise and challenge investment teams and the portfolio companies on ESG initiatives.
I believe that this setup is very clear, and it allows Partners Group to drive ESG impact through a clear and dedicated governance structure. Slide 5 illustrates our long-standing commitment to sustainability. You know that since 2006, when we first established our ESG and sustainability directive, we have been a committed leader in responsible investing. I believe we were one of the first private market investment firms to sign the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment. Since then, of course, we had to continuously evolve our approach, and we have received the highest possible rating from UNPRI for our ESG and sustainability strategy and governance for 6 consecutive years. 2016 was a milestone.
Already back then, we developed and implemented our proprietary ESG due diligence tool, which is based on the SASB metrics. With this tool, Partners Group incorporates ESG into our investment decision-making process, which is the first step. Later on in 2020, you see that we published our climate change strategy, which is aligned with the TCFD recommendations, and in line with our commitments, we published our first TCFD report recently. Finally, we were pleased to be included in the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices last year as the only global private market firm and among a bit more than 300 listed firms globally. This marks an important recognition, I think, of our corporate sustainability leadership within our industry. Let's move to slide 6.
In 2021, we decided to take our commitment now one step further by developing a comprehensive sustainability strategy that covers both our portfolio and our firm. The strategy really articulates our vision of becoming an impact leader in corporate responsibility to the benefit of our employees and other stakeholders like the environment, for example. Our clients, investors, and employees are keen to understand how this vision looks like for our firm and our portfolio. For both of them, we have defined environmental, social, and governance ambitions.
I believe that these ambitions, because they're combined with targets that are tangible and clear projects, that we will talk about later, present a very systematic and so thoughtful approach, to building sustainability at scale across our broad and deep platform, always with a focus on the most material topics and true ESG impact. At the corporate level, which is shown on the left-hand side, our vision is to create positive and lasting impact for all our stakeholders. Our corporate sustainability ambitions include our carbon reduction program to achieve net zero emissions by 2030, as well as efforts to realize our employees' potential and to become a role model in entrepreneurial ownership that we often talk about, on these calls. At the portfolio level, our vision is to build better and more sustainable assets and companies.
Our ambition focuses on implementing our climate change strategy and Stakeholder Benefits Program, as well as achieving sustainability at scale. We move to slide seven. On the environmental dimension of ESG at portfolio level, our goal is to create long-term value by both investing in the low carbon economy and leading assets on the path to net zero. These two parts of the ambition show that sustainability can happen both through differentiated thematic sourcing of investment opportunities based on deep sector research before we acquire assets and companies in specific sectors, as well as through active and entrepreneurial ESG ownership and governance of existing investments in our portfolio. Both is a part of our transformational investing approach. Now, many of you are familiar that decarbonization is a giga theme for Partners Group, which drives our thematic sourcing efforts.
According to our own research, up to $50 trillion of decarbonization infrastructure investment will be required by about 2040 to achieve the Paris Agreement objective. Private capital will invest in these areas of carbon replacement, conservation, and management. As a firm, we have already been very active in this space since more than 20 years, and we made more than 25 investments. If you would like to learn more about that, I invite you to read the thematic research referenced in our corporate sustainability report. In our sustainability strategy, however, we do not single out or restrict ourselves to decarbonization assets. More generally, our strategy applies to and does focus on our controlled assets, starting with our private equity and infrastructure business.
On slide eight, I would like to now give you an overview of the key ESG targets that we have defined at portfolio level. I will highlight just a few, and let me start with governance. Our ambition is to realize sustainability at scale, as shown at the top right of this slide. For the assets and companies that we own on behalf of our clients and that we control as majority shareholders, a first natural step is to establish a clear ESG governance structure. Our plan is to always appoint three leaders who are responsible for ESG at asset level. One leader at board, one at executive, and one at operational level. Together with these three leaders, Partners Group wants to develop a meaningful ESG journey for these businesses based on strategic ESG initiatives with meaningful impact.
It's clear that these ESG initiatives must be on the board agenda, just like traditional business initiatives. Let us look at our environmental targets in the left column. We set four areas that we expect our portfolio companies to focus on during our ownership. First, we expect our portfolio companies to measure and assure their greenhouse gas footprint, which is of course, just a starting point. We expect our companies to develop a greenhouse gas reduction strategy to reduce carbon equivalence by 50% by 2035 on average, which is an interim milestone on the path to net zero. We expect them to meaningfully reduce emissions already during our ownership period. We also expect environmental efforts to ultimately move beyond carbon, starting with an assessment of the broader environmental footprint, focusing on material topics such as managing water resources and biodiversity.
On the social side, please look at the middle column. Our targets focus on topics such as employee engagement and diversity and inclusion. The one target I would like to highlight is the Stakeholder Benefits Program, which you already know from prior communications. Our goal is to build companies that employees decide to work for and want to achieve this by reinvesting substantially into education and development, health and safety, financial or well-being initiatives. We will, going forward, institutionalize our approach to Stakeholder Benefits programs based on our experience made with past pilot programs. If you take a moment to step back and look at this set of 12 goals, I hope you agree with us that these will be pretty comprehensive ESG journeys that are not straightforward. They are clearly requiring multi-year effort.
Our assets will share common ESG standards as you see, but we will also allow them to be unique in their respective ESG journeys. Let me conclude my part of this presentation by sharing the corporate level targets on slide nine. Our ambition on governance side is to become a role model in entrepreneurial ownership and governance for our peers and portfolio assets. Our targets include diversity at board level and linking effective compensation to ESG. An important area is also to refine our ESG strategy, governance and control framework to meet the very high standards set out by the UNPRI. Furthermore, new regulations like SFDR, this is the European Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation, requires the private markets industry and Partners Group to become more formal and systematic.
Over the past two years, we have already taken significant steps to prepare for upcoming ESG regulation, but more work will be needed. Reality is that Partners Group will invest substantially behind the scenes to lay a solid foundation to ultimately realize sustainability at scale at firm and portfolio level. On the environmental side, again, the left column, we wanna launch a carbon reduction program as a firm to achieve net zero emissions for our greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. You see that this is an ambitious timeline. We plan for carbon reductions by switching to renewable energy where possible, and offsetting as a last resort. We will fund our contributions to nature-based solutions with an internal carbon price of $50.
We also plan to develop an ambitious decarbonization program for Partners Group using our own expertise and available technology-based solutions from our portfolio companies, for which we have given ourselves 2030 as the timeline. I stop here. My colleague, Kirsta, will dive deeper later on into the social ambitions and targets in her presentation. First, I would like to hand over to our Head of ESG, Carmela Mondino, to talk you through some of the portfolio ESG highlights and challenges in 2021. Over to you, Carmela.
Thanks, André. Now if we go to slide 11, I would like to focus a bit on our ESG investing framework, so focusing on the portfolio now. As a firm, we hold ourselves to the highest standards of ESG, and we do so by integrating them in our transformational investment strategy. We have 100% of our AUM covered by our ESG and sustainability directive, and this means that we have an ESG approach for each type of asset class and investment strategy. This is throughout the investment life cycle, so from sourcing, all the way to the ownership period. As André mentioned, our thematic investing approach includes really a focus on sustainability giga-theme, for instance, decarbonization, and it's what guides our investment professionals in what they should source as it relates to ESG.
Now, if we focus on the slide on the screen, on the left, you have our non-controlled investments. Our investment philosophy here is really characterized by, you know, a traditional ESG approach, what you would call stewardship. It's really similar to the approach that is adopted in private markets. Now, for controlled assets to your farther right, our ESG approach goes really beyond this. We have a strategic ESG approach based on our active ownership approach. This is where my team has the most fun and the investment teams have more fun because as an active owner, we can go beyond just excluding and drive ESG engagement and triggering change within our assets.
We can do this because of our governance rights and because we have done this in the past, so we have expertise on the different ESG topics. For this reason, we can really not only enhance the ESG performance of the companies, but we can also transform them into impact leaders for specific ESG topics. Also as active owners, therefore, we don't just focus on mitigating risk or protecting value, but we actually create value and build more sustainable businesses, which is what Partners Group ultimately wants to do. Now if we go to slide 12. In 2021, we published our fourth ESG dashboards, and this is what we use to report on our ESG performance.
We collect this data through our annual ESG KPI survey, which we conduct throughout our direct lead and joint lead investments. This focuses on key ESG topics and lets us track our assets' ESG performance. Now, we defined these KPIs based on the SASB standards. We, you know, we see a lot of very different industries throughout our portfolio. The idea is that we focus on the most important topics for each one of them, while at the same time having a portfolio-wide view. This is important because that way we have increased transparency, which helps us communicate with our clients and other stakeholders, but also see ESG projects within the portfolio companies and communicate on our expectations based on the progress that the companies make.
Now, something, as I said, is very important to us is materiality. That's why there's a color coding here. The light boxes indicate relatively low materiality topics, while the darker shades of blue indicate high materiality. For metrics that are, we would say, more qualitative in nature, like environmental management or the cybersecurity approach, we conduct maturity assessments, and we give each company a score from 1 to 4 based on 4 dimensions. With 1 indicating a low level of maturity and 4 indicating best practice. Now, for assets that have been in the portfolio for more than 1 year, we also include arrows to indicate the company's performance. That way, we don't need to put the two dashboards, one next to the other.
This is important because we do it, yeah, year on year. Each company prioritizes a subset of these topics every year. These are the darker boxes that you see around metrics. We publish our dashboards for private equity and for private infrastructure. As I said in the beginning, this is the fourth year we do this, so we can identify positive trends, but also opportunities for improvement. If we focus now on our private equity dashboard, the one that is on the screen, some key areas that we would like to highlight are, you know, on the environmental side, we still need to do some more work on waste. This is a challenge for companies in a broad range of industries.
On the social side, we are happy to say that we have improved health and safety metrics in around 35% of our portfolio. That's a positive contribution towards our portfolio companies' employees. On the governance side, we will continue our focus on entrepreneurial governance. Now if we move to the next slide 13, please. Now looking into our infrastructure portfolio. Here we see opportunities for improvement on the environmental side, for instance, by increasing our emissions data coverage. On the social side, we actually made a big improvement on community engagement and reduced community complaints, and this is a key topic for any construction asset. On the governance side, we also see an opportunity for increasing ESG transparency by reporting on broader ESG performance and having dedicated reports.
Now, this is the general view, but my colleague, Sujit John, a managing director in our Private Equity Health & Life vertical, will conclude the ESG section of the portfolio by walking you through an example of our ESG engagement work with a company called PCI, and this is on slide 14. Sujit was a board member at PCI, facilitated the ESG engagement with them, and knows the company inside out. He should have a lot of insights to share.
Thank you, Carmela. A key part of our ESG work is engaging with portfolio companies in improvement projects on topics that are highly material to them. One example of the work we carried out with PCI Pharma Services to enhance its approach to health and safety and waste and energy management. We acquired PCI Pharma Services on behalf of our clients in July 2016 and sold our majority stake at the end of 2021. Although we still hold a significant minority stake in our active owner value creation process. PCI is a global provider of outsourced pharmaceutical supply chain solutions supporting biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies throughout the various stages of drug development and commercialization. The company has over 25 good manufacturing facilities globally and almost 4,000 employees. During our ownership period, we worked with PCI on a broad range of value creation initiatives.
One key focus area was energy. PCI manages large amounts of paper and glass, which ultimately turn in some proportion to scrap. During our ownership, PCI reduced its scrap percentage from low figures and increased its recycling rates over 75%, with a target to reach 100% in 2021. This had an estimated EBITDA impact of $0.9 million, and it helped the company improve its ecological sustainability rating to gold. PCI also engaged with an external energy management consultancy to identify low and no cost measures to reduce its energy consumption and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In 2019, the company also began holding biweekly environmental management systems during team meetings geared towards improving conservation performance across the company. The measures implemented achieved a 15% reduction in energy consumption, with an estimated EBITDA impact of $1.6 million.
Finally, ensuring the well-being of company employees is an important part of the manufacturing company's operations. During our ownership, PCI committed to standardizing best practice in health and safety initiatives. The company is now working towards continuous improvement in its total recordable injury rate and lost time incident rate performance. It's managed to reduce its total recordable injury rate from 1.7 in 2019 to 0.7 in 2021, and its lost time incident rate from 2.0 in 2019 to 0.5 in the same time period. To ensure a continued commitment to these ESG focus areas, as part of our exit, we shared ESG material and an overview of projects to be completed with new lead investors. Today, as a minority investor, we remain committed to supporting PCI on its ESG journey.
I'd like to highlight that our ESG engagement work with PCI Pharma Services is just one example of the deep ESG work we were conducting with portfolio companies even before our sustainability strategy was formalized. In other words, strong ESG engagement has always been a part of our active ownership approach. With our new strategy, we'll be an even stronger focus going forward. I will now hand it back over to Carmela, who will give you some highlights across the portfolio.
Thanks. Thanks, Sujit. I mean, in the beginning, the sound was a bit choppy, but I think if the audience wants to see the details, there's a case study on PCI in our report, so please feel free to take a look. But thanks. Now to really wrap up the portfolio part, I will move to the next slide. We want to highlight that, you know, as Sujit mentioned, this is something that we have been doing for a long time. You know, our efforts on PCI are not an isolated case study, but that such initiatives are really persistent across our entire portfolio. This overview that you can see on the slide shows the aggregated impact from our portfolio in different topics.
We cannot really aggregate everything because our companies are really diverse. There are some common themes. For instance, one of them is the energy saved, the CO2 emissions avoided, or you know, jobs created as well. This is data again that we collect throughout the portfolio, through the same ESG KPI survey we conduct across our direct lead and joint lead investments. It's what enables us to measure key aspects of our ESG performance. With that, I would like to hand over to Kirsta for the final part of this presentation, which focuses on our corporate sustainability highlights. Kirsta, back to you.
Thank you, Carmela. Turning to the next slide, as André mentioned at the beginning of the call, I'd first like to walk you through some of the key targets we've defined at the corporate level and some of the initiatives we've got to achieve those targets. The purpose of all of this is to realize our employees' potential and achieve our ambition of becoming an impact leader in corporate responsibility to the benefit of our employees and other stakeholders. This is deeply meaningful and important to us because as an investment firm, our success is grounded in our ability to see what others don't see and make good investment decisions. That insight and decision-making comes from our people. Supporting our people's growth is really vital to our success.
That's why our social targets at the corporate level focus on topics that are really material to our people. If I start to take you through some of those goals that we've got and the initiatives that sit underneath them, the first one is top quartile employee engagement by 2025. How we drive that is we've been firstly measuring employee engagement since 2019, and our survey breaks down the results to the C-level, so individual key managers in our organization, so that they can work on those individually, but we also plan actions at a corporate level for topics that need improvement across the firm. We also then incorporate those into performance management in a couple of ways.
First of all, since we started measuring engagement in 2019, the individual leaders' results on that survey have formed a key element of performance ratings on the leadership topic each year. Secondly, this year, what we started doing is putting concrete goals based on the engagement survey results into leaders' goals for the year. I'll speak a little bit more about that when we get into diversity and inclusion. Second key target that we've got is around equal pay for equal work globally. This is something that we've been measuring for many years, but in 2020, we actually started and continued in 2021 to engage with external parties in order to ensure that our measurements are in line with global standards.
This most recent year, we started working with an organization called EDGE to do that measurement, and we found no unexplainable pay gap. The third goal is around ensuring that our teams reflect the local talent pools and societies that we operate in. The way that we're doing that is through targeted recruitment campaigns. For many years now, we've had a couple of programs to recruit more females into our organization, which is a challenge across the industry. Then we've expanded that this year through a summer internship program that will also seek to bring representatives of a number of other underrepresented groups such as race and LGBT plus status into the organization.
Finally, well, second to last, we aim for at least 25 female leaders in senior management by 2025, and I'll go in a little bit more detail into how we're aiming to achieve that in a moment. Finally, our last goal is to relaunch our PG Stakeholder Impact effort. There, what we're focusing on this year is actually streamlining and bringing together three initiatives that have started over the years to make them easier for employees to participate in and really have a meaningful impact with. That, I think, summarizes our key initiatives in 2022 to continue to progress on these goals.
If I take you to the next slide, what we would like to talk about is just a bit of a zoom in on some of the topics that I've highlighted there, starting with employee engagement, as this continued to be one of the key topics that we worked on in 2021. As I mentioned, we've been measuring employee engagement since 2019. What we found in 2021 is that engagement was at 68%, which is below the target of 75%. We have now remeasured, and we can say that we're on track to achieve our 75% target by 2025.
The survey also helped us identify a number of areas to focus on, including hiring and resourcing, and increasing resources to increase our hiring rate, and then strengthening our commitments around diversity and inclusion, which I'll speak to in a moment. One area that we continue to place a strong emphasis on is empowering our people through learning, and that's our PG Academy platform. We were really happy to see in 2021 that employee satisfaction with our learning and development offerings increased very significantly, and we continue to work on improving those in 2022 as well. Our platform, PG Academy, is a learning and development platform that offers flexible and scalable learning offerings with targeting business functional, technical, leadership, and personal development skills.
In 2021, we expanded that platform to match the scale of the firm, increasing the variety and the volume of our offering by 35% and the average number of training hours per person by 25%, which we were really happy to see. Another area of focus is finally diversity and inclusion. Our conviction is that the importance of diversity and inclusion to our business remains unchanged. We defined our conviction on this topic back in 2020. You know, in summary, it's that since our founding, we have seen time and again that we make the best decisions when we collaborate, jointly, explore, and vigorously debate a range of viewpoints in order to achieve clarity of direction. That requires both diversity of perspectives and inclusiveness in terms of how we consider those different perspectives.
Going into that a little bit further, if we turn to slide 19, you can see a summary of our conviction statement and also how we have expanded our diversity and inclusion committee over the last year. I think what I'd like to highlight is this really is an employee-driven effort. One of the ways that we've expanded the effort over the last year is expanding the focus on employee networks. We now have five employee networks, which include a women's network, pride network, parents network, The Black Network, and veterans network. All of those networks are actively involved in partially in recruiting underrepresented members into Partners Group, but also ensuring that the Partners Group that they join is an inclusive one that is one where all people want to stay and build their careers.
We're very proud of the work that group has done over the last year. If we move to slide 20, I promised a little bit more of a deep dive on our goals around representation. In particular, right now our focus is on gender diversity. We are at, as you can see on the left-hand side of the slide, 39% of our employees across the firm are female, 38% in the executive committee. We've had some turnover in our board this year, but we remain at 25%, in 2021 and in 2022 at the board level. In terms of hitting our goal, we're still not progressing as fast as we would like to. We are now at 12 out of 25.
Out of our goal of 25 female partners and managing directors. There's a couple of things that we've done this year to accelerate progress. One is we have cascaded that overall goal into individual hiring goals, by department, so that there is increased accountability and ownership of achieving this goal from a hiring perspective. We also want to achieve this goal through internal progression, and there's two things we're doing there. One is expanding our approach to developing female talent to ensure that they are getting the development that they need to progress in their careers. We also continue to measure progression rates, by gender across the organization to ensure that women and men are being progressed at equal rates. I'm happy to say they are in 2020.
In 2021, we've got roughly equal progression rates by gender, by male and female. That concludes the social topics and initiatives. With that, I'd like to hand back to André to conclude our section on ESG.
Thank you, Kirsta. Thank you also, Sujit and Carmela. I believe this just ends the first part of this call. I believe I should, at this point, quickly hand back to Chorus Call, the operator, to explain how questions can be asked to all of us on the call.
Our first question comes from the line of Laurent Millet from Artemis Investment Management. Please go ahead. Mr. Millet, your line is open. You may ask your question.
Thank you. Thank you very much for taking my question. Can you elaborate on why you think you're on track to reaching 75% in terms of engagement? Could you clarify, I think you talked about recalculating the engagement score. Could you please clarify on where you are and where Partners Group kind of ranks compared to peers in the industry? Thank you.
Sure. I can't share too much more detail because we have just done our most recent survey and haven't shared the results with employees yet. We feel it's important that we share with them first before sharing with everyone on this call. What those results have shown is that we are on track for moving towards 75% by 2025. I'll leave it at that and share more in next year's update, if that's all right, on the specifics. We aren't recalculating the numbers, so that might have been me misspeaking. I'm happy to answer any follow-up questions. Certainly, we set the bar at 75%, because we know that is what most high-performing companies reach.
It is above the sort of general industry norm and more at the level where high-performing companies that are strong on engagement and on financial performance achieve.
Okay. In terms of the area maybe for improvement, when you look at the kind of details of the engagement survey, where do you think you have kind of more room for improvement and where do you think Partners Group scores very well?
We tend to do very well on questions relating to customer centricity, and accountability and speed of decision making. Where we're trying to improve is some of the areas that we've talked about here, and that's why they're a focus. Diversity and inclusion is one. Where we tend to actually do very well on questions relating directly to inclusion, like, employees feeling respected. We tend to be above the high performing norm on those kinds of questions, but we still know that we've got more room to improve in terms of actually, you know, the numbers that we've got in our employee population that we've shared there. That's one of our key areas of improvement. Another one is decision authority.
We as a firm have been fast and nimble in the past on the basis of a very centralized decision authority. As we become more global, it's important that we bring different perspectives into that decision making. That's one of the key areas that we're working on as well.
Looks like we have no further questions on the phone, so we'll go to a few of the questions that have come through through the webcast. The first for André, is the Stakeholder Benefits Program still in its pilot phase? And if so, what does the pilot scheme look like and has it met his expectations or hopes?
Thanks for that question. I believe the pilots have been completed, so we are beyond the pilots now. You know, the next step of the Stakeholder Benefits Program is really to formalize this into a more systematic framework that can be rolled out across our portfolio and that it can be governed by our portfolio company boards. I think based on the lessons learned, and I'm gonna share two examples later. Based on the lessons learned, it's now very natural that the Stakeholder Benefits Program is a key ambition, a focus area, a target of our broader sustainability strategy. The intention has not changed. It's still the same scope, as like as we have previously communicated. It's about education.
It's about also environment, but it's primarily about social initiatives or also more straightforward to financial support. I believe the way I talk about it and the way we see it as a company is that this is a real brilliant example of a multi-year effort because it's one target that we wanna apply quite broadly. We say that we wanna really develop an institutionalized approach to our Stakeholder Benefits Program as a key project for 2022. What it really means is that every company needs to tailor and you know, go to the drawing board and figure out what are the real needs by employees for the respective asset, for the respective region. This is now a multi-year effort for every portfolio company.
Our signal is clearly that we welcome and require that employees are explicitly addressed as a stakeholder. The two examples that we share in our CSR report is a German asset called Schleich where we have really established an employee incentive program which gives every employee the opportunity to invest in the company and to benefit from the value creation and financial upside. That's an example of a Stakeholder Benefits Program that financially benefits our employees. The second example that we share is an American asset called EyeCare Partners where we have really established a benefits package a plan that focuses on health insurance, for example.
At the same time, this company has implemented or is institutionalizing a career institute that offers training and staff support for their employees and really helps them with the further education for these employees. I believe we are beyond the pilot program. It's a multi-year effort. It has found its base in the sustainability strategy, and I'm really excited that we do put employees as a key stakeholder into the strategy. Of course, we're gonna provide updates going forward where we stand, what the achievements look like and where we come across like obstacles.
The next question we have from the webcast is for Carmela. Could you please elaborate on the employee turnover in our portfolio companies on your ESG dashboard? Compared to last year, has it stabilized? Is it not coming down?
Yes, sure. I mean, it's a good question. I would start by thinking, you know, that there are a couple of considerations to be made on that. Turnover is really industry specific, so the high levels must be assessed against the same industry. Companies, for instance, in the retail and food sectors, for instance, will have higher turnover than industrial companies, but that's just the nature of the business. Now, another thing to take into consideration here is that this is the second year the dashboard includes the impact of COVID, as the survey data is from July 2020 to June 2021. For that reason, the turnover metrics still have the impact of the pandemic, and we are still seeing a lot of movement after the first year of uncertainty in the job market, right?
Actually, even if we work hard with our portfolio companies, you know, having an employee engagement program is a core area of our ESG engagement. We expect turnover levels to remain high for the next duration of the dashboard. But hopefully it will continue improving over time, not only because of our work, but also because of the evolution of the market.
Thank you. We have another question for Carmela. Would you define your approach as impact investing?
Well, actually, no, we do not define it as impact investing. We integrate ESG throughout our platform, and this is something that can be done for any type of company, independently of what they do as it relates, you know, to their operations and how they do business. At Partners Group, we define impact investments as companies that make a positive contribution to society or the environment through their business model, so focusing on the product or service, basically the what they do. You know, for us, ESG is something that is about building more sustainable businesses, is something that any responsible investor can and should do.
For us, it's not impact investing, but you can find more information on this in our ESG versus impact vertical, which is included in the report.
Thank you. The next question we have on the webcast is for André. Have the ESG targets of your strategy been reflected in senior management bonus and remuneration arrangements?
Well, actually, they will be reflected that you know that can be found in the compensation report. The Nomination Compensation Committee is gonna be responsible for that. The plan is that the executive team's compensation will be linked also to sustainability-related progress and targets. The executive team's long-term incentives are linked or are determined both with a quantitative and a qualitative element. What we wanna do is we wanna qualitatively assess the progress made by the executive team on sustainability-related targets and project areas. I say qualitative assessment because I do believe that judgment needs to supersede formula.
What I would like to see from the executive team, but it's up to the board to compensate the executive team, is that they really initiate and drive tangible long-term projects such as the ones that are laid out in sustainability strategy. Hopefully there's progress. I'd prefer this dedication and project and progress over specifying a small set of short-term KPIs that can be more easily achieved. That is how we intend to link the executive team's compensation to sustainability.
Maybe going one step beyond, what I find important as Chairman of Sustainability is that sustainability is on the goal setting of not just like the executive team, but of investment leaders, investment professionals, and beyond investment teams, because the sustainability strategy will depend on many leaders and most employees really contributing. That's why sustainability will be a goal that should make it into the assessment over the years to come.
Thank you, André. The next question we have is for Kirsta from the webcast. Why is the progression to 25 women in senior leadership slow? What are the challenges and how is PG tackling them?
Sure. Slow, I think there's 2 reasons or there's 2 paths to achieving the goal. One is internal progression, and that was our first bias to achieve the goal through progressing female talent internally. The challenge there is simply the long-term nature of that. Our emphasis as a firm has always been on hiring talent at the beginning of their careers, and training them on our methods, and ways of working. It takes, you know, 10-15 years to get to that MD level, and therefore, we've got a long-term project there. To make sure that we do continue to progress from that perspective, we did 2 years ago start measuring progression rates, as I mentioned before. On the...
We also set goals for our graduate program, our financial analyst program, to ensure that 40%-60% of our employees coming in through that route are coming from underrepresented and also female groups. We are also, as I mentioned before, investing more in targeted development for female employees to ensure that they are maximizing their potential in Partners Group. That's the progression side. On the hiring side, senior hiring, we did determine two years ago that we would not only achieve the goal through internal progression, that we would also need external hires. The challenges there's a reality which is that female talent is in high demand in this industry at the moment.
There's a pay challenge, where they can often demand more pay than others, and equal pay for us does mean equal pay, so we won't go outside of our pay bands. That's one challenge, but I think that's an overcomable challenge. I think the other challenge is that the fast growth of our firm has meant that we have often veered towards candidates who are willing to move now. I think female talent can sometimes be more cautious about moving firm. What we're doing there is starting to invest more in developing a longer-term relationship with some both female and male talent to ensure that we really are getting the best people into the firm, not just the people who are available now.
Those are some of the things that we're doing to overcome those challenges.
Thank you, Kirsta. A final question from the webcast for Carmela. What KPIs do you report to investors, and how do you report the achievement of your environmental goals?
Good question also. Look, we have our ESG KPI dashboards, and this covers our direct lead and joint lead portfolio. This is included in our public CSR report, right? The one that we're publishing today. Now when we created these dashboards years ago, there was no common framework on ESG reporting back in the day, at least, you know, for all these different types of assets. In the end, we are firm believers in sharing best practice and not reinventing the wheel. As we, you know, continuously improve our reporting and also expand to other asset classes and investment strategies, we're looking into the new frameworks that have emerged in the industry.
For that, on the KPI and measurement side, we're currently working on reconciling our ESG reporting frameworks or our dashboards with the EU's KPI, so the Principal Adverse Impacts that the SFDR regulation has established. We actually welcome the EU Sustainable Finance Action Plan because it actually has a framework that will be used by hopefully all managers. Of course, we will continue using SASB as our materiality approach, but we will use SFDR as our ultimate guidance, and we are putting a lot of effort into you know, being able to report for all asset classes in that sense.
For the second part of the question, on the environmental side, you know, 100% of the sustainability strategy and in reporting on environmental topics and on emissions in particular is actually one of the core pillars. When we have made the acquisitions, most of our companies are not really tracking their emissions. That's why we're putting them on a path to first re-measure, then get assurance on these measurements and then have a plan to reduce. This will be reflected in our communication efforts as we report on the footprint of our portfolios.
Thank you, Carmela. We have no further questions on the webcast.
Which, I assume means that, this corporate sustainability update has come to an end. I would like to say thank you, everyone, for your questions, for your time. I wish you a lovely day, and I look forward together with Carmela and Kirsta and the team at Partners Group to update you on sustainability, in one year at the latest. Okay, all the best. Speak soon. Thank you.