People

In responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, one of our top priorities was working to ensure the health, safety and well-being of the Tiffany & Co. workforce. Our approach was carefully considered and aimed to be global, sustainable, consistent and inclusive.

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2020, a substantial number of our retail stores were temporarily closed. The pandemic also impacted the operation of our office locations, manufacturing and servicing facilities and distribution centers, including through the effects of facility closures, reductions in operating hours, staggered shifts and other social distancing measures. As the global community recovers from the pandemic, we continue to support our teams and facilities with health and safety oversight across our markets and in accordance with applicable guidelines established by local governments. As part of our ongoing processes, we developed guidelines to help us ensure that health and safety considerations are consistently applied and met.

During this time, we have continued to reinforce Tiffany & Co.’s cultural values, commitment to diversity and inclusion, and support for our network of Employee Resource Groups throughout the Company. To further our commitment, we provided learning and growth opportunities to employees in all markets through the launch of our global TiffanyU platform, enabling them to pivot to virtual learning in response to the pandemic. To support the well-being of our employees during the pandemic, we have relied on existing policies, including our caregiver leave and sick pay provisions. We also emphasize transparency and connection among our employees, regularly sharing important company updates, as well as wellness tips, tools for coping, and information on community giving and volunteering.

Our mission for Diversity and Inclusion is to fully leverage the power of our people, and we have set an ambitious goal to make Tiffany & Co. an employer of choice, recognized as the most inclusive luxury brand by 2025, with a diverse and highly engaged workforce that is empowered by an inclusive and innovative workplace culture. We define diversity as the unique identities, expressions, ideas, abilities and cultures of all our people—from our more than 13,000 employees to our cherished clients and the communities where we live and operate. We believe the combined power of all these perspectives enables our company to grow and succeed.

We build our efforts around three strategic pillars with clear objectives:

Talent: Expand our diverse workforce and build competencies to deliver for our business, clients and communities.

Culture: Build an inclusive workplace where employees feel all aspects of themselves are valued and leaders demonstrate and model inclusive behaviors.

Brand: Be recognized as the most inclusive luxury brand by implementing successful diversity and inclusion practices that grow our business.

In 2020, we took a number of steps to advance these pillars, with an emphasis on actions to combat racism and build a greater sense of agency and belonging. These steps included launching our Employee Resource Group (ERG) Advisory Council, spanning multiple functions, regions and levels within Tiffany & Co. Council members provide robust, transparent feedback on initiatives and generate ideas for the business.

We have embedded Diversity and Inclusion focus areas—including materials on microaggressions, micro-inclusions and inclusive decision making—into learning and development opportunities offered to all employees. Additionally, we now offer Unconscious Bias Awareness training in multiple languages.

To further our commitment, our Diversity and Inclusion team started a monthly podcast, True Talk, exploring identity and culture within our Company. We also joined the Black in Fashion Council as an inaugural member, and introduced a program in which Tiffany employees offer monthly mentoring sessions and a virtual career fair for members of the Lower Eastside Girls Club. These efforts and more have helped Tiffany increase our Global Inclusion Index score, which measures the extent to which employees feel proud, valued and accepted at work.

Tiffany & Co. is proud to champion women as clients, employees and leaders in our Company. We focus on the representation of women throughout our Company and embed respect for gender equality through our policies and commitments. We believe our ongoing efforts help ensure equal opportunities for all of our employees to reach their full potential in the workplace.

We strive to maintain an open and ongoing dialogue with our employees, which helps us to make Tiffany a better, more fulfilling place to work. Throughout the year, we engage our employees through a variety of remote and on-site events, including trainings and health and wellness activities. We also actively seek employee feedback through formal and informal touchpoints, including a biannual Employee Engagement survey which measures engagement and inclusion, among other items. To complement our global survey, we use Pulse surveys—brief surveys that are distributed throughout the year to targeted groups of employees—to maintain a dialogue with our employee base.

We believe that by helping our employees grow as professionals, we grow as a company. We support career development and growth through a number of programs, including TiffanyU, Tiffany Talent Marketplace, Career Conversation Guides, Grow with Tiffany, the Tiffany Academy for Excellence and Diversity in Leadership and our Performance Acceleration process.

Our goal is to create a diverse, high-performing and engaged workforce. We are committed to increasing leadership development participation for employees at all levels and saw increased participation from 2019 to 2020.

In 2020, we created TiffanyU, a modern approach to learning and development for all Tiffany employees. This global platform provides access to on-demand learning; leadership and management-development programs, including livestreamed and on-demand virtual programs; peer-to-peer social learning and LinkedIn Learning with more than 16,000 micro-learning courses in seven languages. Through TiffanyU, we launched three leadership development programs that build foundational leadership capabilities aligned with our cultural values, as well as skills and habits for effective coaching and feedback, and competencies to help our people become next-generation leaders. Further adapting to the challenges of 2020, we deployed these learning experiences virtually, with approximately 2,500 employees participating in these online programs. We believe that giving all of our employees access to these leadership development opportunities and capability-building tools will strengthen our Company and help us become the next generation luxury jeweler.

Our Performance Acceleration process uses tools that help employees and managers identify strengths and areas for growth on an ongoing basis. The process is set up in a way that aims to mitigate bias, which can inadvertently influence the performance appraisal process.

We believe that respecting human rights in line with the UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights and other international human rights laws and standards is fundamental to our work as a responsible company. We strive to embody these values in our culture, and we seek to embed respect for human rights across our value chain through our vertically integrated business model. Because we own and operate our own manufacturing facilities, we can better ensure that manufacturing workers’ human rights are respected.

In our own diamond cutting and polishing facilities—located in five countries—we offer safe and healthy work environments; and we adhere to health and safety standards that, in many places, go above and beyond local laws. We also primarily hire locally, which contributes to local economies and communities, and we pay our workers at our manufacturing facilities a living wage in developing countries. Outside the walls of our business, we seek to advance respect for human rights through advocacy and philanthropy.

By holding ourselves to high standards, committing to continuous improvement of our practices and speaking out for human rights, we believe we can help to influence change in those locations where we operate and in the broader jewelry industry.

For more than 10 years, Tiffany & Co. has had a living wage program at our manufacturing facilities in developing countries. As part of this program, we use the Anker Methodology, a pioneering methodology for measuring living wage that exceeds government minimum-wage requirements. We determine a living wage as pay that is intended to support the needs of our employees, including for decent housing, a healthy diet, adequate health care, transportation, education through secondary school and other essential needs for them and their families, while also meeting cultural expectations and affording for some discretionary income and unforeseen emergencies.

Tiffany & Co. is committed to the health and safety of our employees, every day and especially in times of crisis. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we acted quickly to safeguard the health of our employees. In addition to applying our existing policies to support employees with paid leave when they were sick or needed time off to care for loved ones, we took a number of steps to ensure their health and safety in accordance with local government and health regulations. This included temporarily closing stores, reducing operating hours, staggering shifts, reimagining spaces to allow for social distancing, and offering remote and flexible work arrangements where appropriate.

This commitment to health and safety is also ingrained in our company policies. In 2018, we codified our global Occupational Safety and Environmental Management Standards to articulate our expectations around managing the safety and environmental aspects of all worldwide retail, offices, distribution facilities and manufacturing locations we operate. Our standards align with the internationally recognized ISO 14001 environmental management and ISO 45001 occupational health and safety standards. We have also created a number of programs to reduce workplace hazards and educate our employees on how to lead healthy, productive lives through our Healthy Tiffany program. Additionally, we provide services to promote the comfort and well-being of employees at our manufacturing facilities, such as complimentary breakfast and health centers on site, as well as air conditioning.