Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Strategy

Occupational Health and Safety. We manage environmental, health and safety risks via a sophisticated EHS system, including engineering controls, policies, procedures, training, monitoring, audits and a proactive culture. Our risk-based approach focuses on the prevention of injuries, resulting in no recordable cases in 2021.

We continue to scrutinize, evaluate and monitor safety hazards, such as potential chemical exposures, through job hazard analyses, enhanced by our Emergency Response teams. We further enable our employees to identify potential safety hazards through trainings and a responsible reporting rewards program.

People Management. Our business benefits tremendously from the strength of our team, which is built on the training, ability, experience and cultural fit of its individual members. But hiring is only the first step in the process. We invest in our team so they can continue to develop their talents and capabilities, broaden their experience, and achieve their full potential at QuantumScape.

We support talent development for all our employees through a combination of on-the-job learning, formal training, individualized education, and development opportunities, complemented by our performance management system. As we expand our team, we balance a promote-from-within philosophy with the need to recruit top talent from a range of different industries and all over the world. We are implementing robust management development programs to help leaders engage and develop their team members.

We believe growth and performance result from investing in our employees across a broad spectrum of training, development, and career advancement, but there is also an important role for compensation to reward and retain valuable team members. We balance the need for internal pay equity with the necessity for market-leading compensation as we grow and compete for talent. Bonuses, RSUs, and an employee stock purchase offerings are important ways for us to reward our employees for their performance and ensure that they participate in the success of the business. 100% of our full-time regular employees hold equity in our company.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Our company is built on innovation, which requires people with different skills, experiences, and perspectives working collaboratively to develop new ways of approaching persistent problems. Our culture of innovation is sustained and bolstered only when everyone feels welcome, accepted, and valued.

We’re always mindful of what we promote when we promote. We have taken proactive steps towards eliminating unconscious bias in our hiring and promotion processes, enabling us to add and promote team members who demonstrate behaviors aligned with our values. These steps include:

• Delivering unconscious bias training for our senior leaders
• Implementing job leveling framework to ensure candidates are assessed against a consistent set of criteria, complemented by structured interview training provided to managers
• Making certain that our commitment to equal hiring and promotion opportunities is substantiated with equal pay for equal work, by conducting an annual internal pay equity analysis to identify any weaknesses
  
  

Data Protection and Security. We proactively identify, monitor, and manage data security risks in order to prevent breaches or material vulnerabilities. We provide employee training at onboarding and on an annual basis to enhance our security, and we deploy third-party penetration tests and use adaptive behavioral algorithms as well as malware signatures to monitor anomalous behavior.