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Diversity and Inclusion

At SAP, our commitment to diversity and inclusion is critical to our success.

Diversity and inclusion at SAP

As a global organization with employees from 150+ nationalities, our employees must feel free to be their authentic selves for our company to perform at its best. 

SAP is committed to being one of the most diverse and inclusive software companies in the world. We proactively promote diversity, inclusion, and social justice and work to ensure that our workforce reflects the gender parity and demographics of all the regions where we have employees. We make every effort to ensure that all stages of the employee lifecycle are inclusive to enable employee success, hold leaders accountable, and build a diverse ecosystem – both internally and among our partners and customers.

Inclusive Culture

Enabling leaders to take accountability for building and maintaining an inclusive organization and culture and recognizing leaders who are role models.

Diverse Ecosystem

Leveraging technology for inclusion, ensuring that our tools are accessible, and contributing to a diverse and inclusive tech ecosystem.

Inclusive Career Journeys

Ensuring all stages of the employee journey are inclusive of all employees with focused efforts to attract, retain, and motivate a diverse talent pool. 

Inclusive Culture

To thrive as an intelligent enterprise, we need an inclusive culture that empowers people to run at their best, enables the many voices at SAP to create a greater sense of community, and promotes accountability for inclusion and collaboration. 

Our commitment to inclusivity

We recognize that everyone at SAP contributes to our diversity, regardless of gender, age, sexual orientation, nationality, etc. To leverage our collective diversity, we are building inclusive processes and structures to encourage behaviors that support the growth and development of all employees. A diverse team is more effective in addressing the needs of SAP’s global customers and partners, and inclusive culture brings people together to foster innovation.

All employees have a role to play in building and maintaining an inclusive culture

Leaders are held accountable for inclusive hiring and inclusive behaviors, and we are committed to relentlessly pursuing our goal to increase the percentage of women in executive or in leadership positions in addition to reaching full gender parity for all levels. Through new frameworks, enablement materials, inclusive leadership training, and an accountability model for leaders, our leaders are force-multipliers when it comes to inclusive capabilities.

Common backgrounds, interests, or concerns connect and influence culture and success

Employee network groups (ENGs) include the Business Women's Network, Pride@SAP, the Black Employee Network, Cultures@SAP, and Latinos@SAP. Members are the change agents who lead the way in ensuring SAP is a place where everyone can bring their true selves to work every day and work to leverage our diversity as a catalyst for innovation.

Four reasons why ENGs are essential to your company

Employee Network Groups from SAP are about more than support, and U.S. Pride@SAP co-lead Chad Minnick explains how ENGs educate, advocate, and change policies.

Honoring leaders and trailblazers of Hispanic Heritage

Hispanic “stars” often do not receive the recognition they deserve. SAP acknowledges these amazing men and women deserve wider appreciation and celebration. 

Diversity in Tech: Black Employee Network at SAP

The Black Employee Network fosters a best-run culture that cultivates awareness and inclusion for employees by prioritizing recruitment, bolstering retention, providing mentorship, and empowering upward mobility.

Business Women’s Network at SAP defines the way in high tech

Learn how the Business Women’s Network grew to 13,000 members and 61 chapters.

Diverse Ecosystem

A rich and diverse ecosystem drives innovation and allows us to better serve our customers. We will leverage technology for inclusion, ensure our tools are accessible, and build a diverse and inclusive tech ecosystem across the entire supply chain of supplier diversity to consumer experience. 

SAP Product Accessibility

Accessibility deals with individual stories. Everyone has unique abilities and the unique ability to contribute. At SAP, we are proud to say that making our software work for more people has been and continues to be a high priority. We bring accessibility to life with design and development: accessibility features, defined accessibility requirements, and processes are the keys to making our products more accessible.

 

Learn more about accessibility and user experience

 

About Accessibility

Accessibility refers to the possibility for everyone, including people who are differently-abled, to access and use technology and information products. From an aging workforce to more than 1 billion people with disabilities worldwide (according to the World Health Organization), many people need accessible technologies.

 

Business enterprises have increasingly become aware of the requirements of people who need accessible technologies to contribute to a work environment. Accessibility is not only of social but also economic importance for the enterprise.

SAP takes pride in its diverse workforce. To foster a global culture of inclusion, we are strongly committed to respecting and protecting human rights throughout the lifecycle of our products and services: from design through development to use. Hence, our products are increasingly guided by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 Level AA, included in US Section 508, and the harmonized EN 301 549 including WCAG 2.1 Level AA.

 

See SAP’s commitment to human rights

 

Product Information

Options for high contrast appearance, support of assistive tools such as screen readers or speech recognition are just some examples of SAP’s accessibility features. For smooth interoperability, device-specific accessibility support is taken into account. Operating systems, browsers, and assistive tools are tested against the availability and support of common standards.

 

Available now, our accessibility features are incorporated into control sets and libraries of major SAP UI Technologies, like SAP UI5.

 

  • SAP Accessibility Status Documents: The "SAP Accessibility Status Documents" inform about product-specific accessibility features. In particular, they describe the testing environment and report its current status on standards, guidelines, and requirements. The SAP Accessibility Status Documents are available as VPAT® US for our customers in the U.S. and as VPAT® EN 301 549 for our German and international customers. 

For requests, please contact your SAP account executive or us at accessibility@sap.com.

  • Personalization and Customization: Often, built-in accessibility features work "out-of-the-box." Yet, users with specific disabilities might ask for additional personalization options, or certain parameters need to be configured to enable the right features. 

End-user documentation contains information such as keyboard shortcuts, personalization options regarding colors, contrasts, and font sizes, as well as accessible alternatives. 

 

Visit the SAP Help Portal for further information. As an administrator, please check SAP Note 1139953 for customization options. 

 

Our Activities

Our goal is that everyone, in particular the differently-abled, can use SAP software. Accessibility is a guiding principle in SAP’s development process and implemented as such in its policies and standards for software design. In addition, accessibility is firmly reflected in our quality assurance processes. Staying up-to-date, SAP products adhere to the newest industry standards, such as "Accessible Rich Internet Application" (ARIA).

 

As an active member of the W3C WCAG and the W3C Accessibility Guidelines working groups, SAP contributes to easier and optimized support of accessible browser-based applications in the future.

 

SAP’s Accessibility Competence Center in Walldorf, Germany, creates internal standards for accessibility development, documentation, and testing, offers consulting and training for developers, and serves as direct customer contact for all accessibility-related questions.

 

Contact Us

 

Accessibility is a diverse topic. Customers might have general questions about the accessibility features of a specific SAP product, or administrators and users could face specific issues.

 

Please don’t hesitate to contact us at accessibility@sap.com.

 

To report an incident related to an accessibility feature, please read SAP Note 1473897 and use the SAP ONE Support Launchpad.

Supplier Diversity

SAP commits to encouraging a diverse partner and customer ecosystem and promoting standards for supplier diversity. We set targets for diverse suppliers, and leverage SAP Ariba to encourage the use of diverse suppliers in the SAP ecosystem. We work closely with the SAP Procurement Office and SAP Ariba Development team to embed accessibility requirements into processes.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Solutions

The increasing importance of diversity and inclusion requires companies to move beyond bias. SAP SuccessFactors solutions are a key component of a more equitable, inclusive HR strategy in which all the best talent can thrive.

 

Learn more about how SAP SuccessFactors solutions help with DE&I

 

How to make diversity and inclusion part of your company’s DNA

Companies that embed diversity and inclusion into their DNA see better productivity, innovation, customer satisfaction, and financial results.

Business Beyond Bias at SAP

In today’s digital economy, eliminating bias is critical to innovation, customer satisfaction and employee engagement. In this video, SAP proudly showcases “The Faces of Business Beyond Bias.”

How to stop hiring bias

Blindly trusting anything is always a mistake but even more so when HR relies on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to hire people. With the global explosion, it is important to understand how to address hiring bias while making the most of the latest HR technologies.

Inclusive Career Journeys

At SAP, we provide employees with an environment where uniqueness is valued and where expectations for growth and development are transparent. Here is what we are doing to ensure that all stages of the employee journey are inclusive in order to attract, retain and motivate a diverse talent pool.

Our goal is to be the most inclusive software company on the planet. To attract talent from all backgrounds, we offer targeted internship and co-op programs. We also constantly assess sourcing channels to expand our search for creative, smart, talented people. We are growing our Autism at Work program and investing in building relationships at events like #WomenWhoRock because we know that talent comes in all forms and understand that the diversity of our employees is a critical ingredient for fueling innovation.  

We are committed to ensuring fair and transparent hiring practices. One program we leverage to hire talent from diverse backgrounds is Project Propel, a partnership between SAP and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), where SAP teaches its software to undergraduate and MBA students. Another is our SAP Autism at Work Program, which enables us to hire for autism inclusion. By adjusting recruiting processes, we help remove the barriers to entry candidates with autism often face. 

SAP aims for clearly-communicated and transparent promotion processes as we develop fast-tracked action plans for top performers, collect and analyze data to identify progression gaps and career stall trends, and deploy technology to encourage inclusive communication and feedback between employees and managers. We aim to achieve the same promotion ratio for men and women and create opportunities and visibility for high potential women at SAP. We are making progress towards our goal of 30% Women in Leadership (WiL) by 2022. 

SAP invests in targeted career development to fast-track diverse talent, using skill maps to ensure that career development is aligned and targeted with future skill needs. We are also building a framework for our employee network groups to provide opportunities for talent from underrepresented backgrounds to gain crucial skills. SAP also uses a mentoring tool to enable and encourage inclusive mentoring across five generations of employees.

EDGE recertification

SAP recertified on the Economic Dividends for Gender Equality (EDGE) global standard, recognizing our strategic commitment to creating a gender-equal workplace that benefits employees, customers and partners.

Autism at Work

Launched in 2013, SAP was the first global tech company to create a program to leverage the unique abilities of people with autism.

The road to gender equity Is paved by paternity leave

Read about how SAP drives inclusion, with flexibility and parental leave among other benefits for new parents. 

Busting generational myths: Cross-generational intelligence at SAP

There are a variety of myths surrounding the attitudes of different generations. In this blog, Annice Joseph sorts out fact from fiction.

Hiring autistic workers

CBS News highlighted neurodiversity in Tech and featured SAP’s Autism at Work program.

Digital natives leading customer success

Learn about SAP Academy for Sales graduates helping customers achieve their journey to the Intelligent Enterprise.

You may also be interested in…

SAP Integrated Report

The SAP Integrated Report shows how diversity and inclusion integrate into our core business, presenting our financial and non-financial performance in one integrated report for greater insight into our overall performance. 

Health and Well-Being at SAP

Relying on the engagement and purposeful action of a diverse workforce, SAP works continuously to provide an outstanding employee experience. The Global Health & Well-Being team fosters the health and support of the workplace culture.

Equality for All

At SAP, we embrace and encourage different perspectives, and believe we are made stronger by our unique combination of culture, race, ethnicity, age, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, physical or mental ability, and work-life situations.

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