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NEW YORK — L’Oréal has been recognized by Fast Company in the publication’s inaugural Best Workplaces for Innovators list, which honors businesses and organizations that demonstrate a deep commitment to innovation at all levels of the company.
Courtesy of L’Oréal
Created by Fast Company in partnership with Accenture, the 2019 Best Workplaces for Innovators list showcases 50 winners from a variety of industries, including biotech, consumer packaged goods, financial services, cybersecurity, and engineering. Working together, Fast Company editors and Accenture researchers scored 362 applications, and a panel of eight eminent judges reviewed and endorsed the top 50 companies. The 2019 awards feature workplaces from around the world.
“Innovation has fueled our business for more than 100 years,” said Frédéric Rozé, president and chief executive officer of L’Oréal USA. “To respond to the rapid transformations in our industry and meet our ambition to be the worldwide leader in beauty technology and sustainability, we will rely on our culture of innovation and entrepreneurship to help us continually evolve. This recognition is a tribute to our passionate and creative employees who dedicate themselves every day to creating the future of beauty.”
L’Oréal’s dynamic culture provides its employees with entrepreneurial freedom and opportunities to drive transformation across its €26.9B business, encompassing over 35 brands, around the globe. The company’s visionary teams are building leading edge technologies, launching highly personalized products, reimagining consumer experiences, and developing creative solutions to reduce its environmental footprint.
A Legacy of Innovation
Founded by a chemist 110 years ago, L’Oréal continues to advance its commitment to science and technology. With over 4,000 Research and Innovation roles across its global workforce, L’Oréal has a deep bench of expertise ranging from biologists to roboticists, with women accounting for nearly 70% of those roles. The L’Oréal Technology Incubator, established in 2012, has a presence that spans three countries and collaborates with foremost leaders in academia, technology, and design. The company’s open innovation strategy connects the Group to a global ecosystem of startups and includes partnerships with Founders Factory, Partech International Ventures, Station F, and Raise Ventures. This dedication to supporting innovators extends to the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science award program, now in its 21st year, which has supported and raised the profiles of 102 laureates and more than 3,000 talented young scientists, who collectively have received over $10M in financial support.
A Culture of Employee-Led Transformation
L’Oréal is committed to evolution from the inside. In 2018, the company launched the first internally incubated brand in the US, Seed Phytonutrients, which was the brainchild of a passionate executive whose vision for supporting local farmers and creating the industry’s first shower-safe paper packaging was championed and brought to life. In an effort to support employees and foster an inclusive workforce and business, L’Oréal USAhas launched employee-led Think Tanks with a variety of tailored focuses, including the advancement of executive women; the recruitment and support of veterans reentering the workforce; employees with disabilities; and the advancement of LGTBQ initiatives and policies. To date, these Think Tanks have had a direct impact on the company’s policies, including a 2019 update of its parental leave policy, and resulted in L’Oréal’s perfect 100 score on the Human Rights Campaign’s 2019 Corporate Equality Index.
A Global Commitment to Sustainability
L’Oréal is transforming its value chain, leveraging the company’s scale and influence to address major environmental challenges. In 2019, L’Oréal received a “triple-A” rating from the sustainability non-profit CDP for the third year in a row—the only company to do so. The recognition was the result of the company’s Sharing Beauty With All sustainability strategy, which includes a US operations footprint that runs exclusively on renewable energy, and a commitment to reduce the use of virgin plastic by 2025. In 2018, L’Oréal’s proprietary Sustainable Product Optimization Tool (SPOT), a unique evaluation model developed to assess the environmental and social impacts of the company’s products, was honored by Fast Company as a “world changing idea.” This holistic approach to building a more sustainable future led to recognition by the United Nations as a Global Compact Lead for L’Oréal’s commitment to the Ten Principles for Responsible Business.
“Other titles catalog perquisites and benefits. Fast Company seeks to highlight workplaces that attract and retain the best talent by creating environments where employees are empowered to put forth bold ideas, engage in radical experiments, and even fail, in the name of innovation,” said Stephanie Mehta, editor-in-chief of Fast Company.
