Positive impact of migrants on labor productivity

It is a large Italian company with more than 1,000 employees, belonging to German Freudenberg Group. Around 4% of their workforce are non-EU immigrants, coming from 20 countries (two of them are refugees and one is an asylum seeker). Their managers are specifically trained on diversity management because diversity is considered as a value for the corporate growth and competitiveness.

Recruitment depends on the corporate needs for skills and strong motivation, being thus focused on technical and transversal competences of candidates. As a result of the ethnically diversified workforce they report positive impact:

• Better working climate: living in close contact with people from far countries, with different cultural backgrounds, promotes greater understanding and acceptance, thus facilitating the process of inclusion of migrants in the territory.
• Increase in productivity: foreign workers have lower rates of absenteeism than native workers (total corporate rate is around 4%).

The company is among the winners of the Welcome UNHCR project for the years 2018 and 2019.