Our Philosophy

Lafarge's philosophy is based on making our people successful, focusing on performance improvement and being a "multi-local" organization that builds a performance culture.

Making Our People Successful

Courage, integrity, commitment, consideration for others and an overriding concern for the Group's interest are the foundations of Lafarge's management philosophy. Every employee is expected to demonstrate commitment to these values. This is Lafarge's way of building trust at all levels of the organization.

Expecting people to give their best: All of Lafarge's employees are expected to perform at their full potential. Lafarge believes that entrusting people with responsibilities, and not merely tasks, is the best way to leverage their skills, initiatives and motivation.

Leading by example: The bigger the responsibility, the greater the commitment to Lafarge's values must be. Leadership is the ability to mobilize people and to inspire them toward a common ambition and better results. It requires patience, dedication and flexibility to drive change throughout the organization.

Achieving greater result through teamwork: Outstanding achievements are realized as part of a team effort. Teamwork provides the opportunity to complement individual skills and strengths and to compensate for weaknesses and shortcomings. Teamwork is not about reaching consensus on every issue when dealing with conflict; it is about each individual contributing to, accepting and seeking differences of opinion as a source of progress.

Focusing on Performance Improvement

Performance improvement relies on three main anchors:

Making performance a daily commitment: Striving to continuously improve its offer to its customers and stay ahead of its competitors, seizing every opportunity offered to change environments and encourage everyone to always do things better are Lafarge's priorities as a performance-driven organization.

Resulting from the actions of all: Performance is the accumulated result of the actions of all teams and individual employees at every level in the organization. Lafarge wants continuous performance improvement to be a day-to-day priority for each person of the Group.

Sharing systems and tools: Performance requires robust and reliable systems and tools. The Group and its divisions have defined a common performance framework for all of its businesses. The divisions have identified the key value drivers in each business line. These are the areas where each business unit is expected to continuously improve and reach excellence everywhere in the world.

Being a “Multi-Local” Organization

A multi-local organization is created through:

Building on local and global strengths: Each of the Group's businesses is primarily a local business: Lafarge's products cannot economically be transported over significant distances, construction markets have strong local characteristics, proximity is important to customers, relationships with local communities are key, and much of Lafarge's know-how originates from local experience. For the Group, the challenge is to leverage its global strengths without undermining its local entrepreneurial spirit.

Making Lafarge's business units successful by leveraging the resources of a decentralized organization: Managing the tension between "local" and "global" is one of the Group's key challenges and it defines the way Lafarge is organized.

The Group relies on the initiative of its business units. To respond effectively and rapidly to local challenges and serve customers more efficiently, business units are empowered to make most of the decisions that impact them. Their autonomy is not, however, that of a single independent business. Increasingly, their actions have an impact beyond their immediate environment. Therefore, they use the Group's global experience to build their local successes, but also actively contribute to Group and division policies, tools and know-how.

Sharing clear processes and a limited number of respected and known rules: In a group of Lafarge's size, effective decision making requires clear and well-defined processes that allow everyone to understand how a decision is made and who is ultimately responsible. The main process involving all levels of the organization is Lafarge's Management Cycle. It organizes the dialog between staff and line, provides a framework for effective delegation and enables the resolution of conflicting priorities. It ensures that consistency exists between business unit commitments, Group and division objectives and the expectations of Lafarge's shareholders.

A limited number of rules is a prerequisite to efficiency and fairness. These rules should be known by everyone in the organization and implemented consistently throughout the Group, the divisions and the business units. To build a performance culture.