Employee participation

Codetermination and employee participation are important pillars of our human resources strategy. Volkswagen aims to promote high levels of technical expertise and a strong team spirit among its employees. The Company invests in its people, offers employees attractive opportunities for development and promotes a good working climate. This includes employees’ opinions, assessments and constructive criticism being heard.

One tool we use to this end throughout the Group is the opinion survey, through which employees can actively help shape the Company. With this uniform, Group-wide employee survey, we regularly gather information about employee satisfaction. To fundamentally revise the work climate index, in spring 2015 we suspended Group-wide implementation of the tool. In the future, change processes that result from the work climate index will be even more sustainably implemented. The spotlight in 2015 was therefore on implementing the actions identified in the 2014 opinion survey.

The “Volkswagen Way” has been a successful tool for involving Volkswagen AG’s workforce in improving the Company’s efficiency since 2007. By using it, we aim to both increase competitiveness and safeguard employment. A continuous improvement process aimed at achieving continuous process and structure optimization in the areas of productivity and quality, ergonomics, leadership and teamwork helps to ensure these. Again, a particular focus for the “Volkswagen Way” in fiscal year 2015 was on optimizing workflows. To this end, projects were initiated and implemented across all business areas. One example is the standardization and automatic creation of correspondence for the human resources department with the ESCRIBA application system. In addition to the “Volkswagen Way”, a uniform Group-wide production system is used for all brands during production.

Employees use their creativity, knowledge and initiative to take responsibility for process and product improvement under the Ideas Management program. Employees in Germany have submitted over 2.1 million ideas since 1949 using the former suggestion program and today’s Ideas Management program, saving nearly €3.3 billion at the German locations of Volkswagen AG and Volkswagen Sachsen GmbH. Ideas Management is an important leadership and motivational instrument for line supervisors. It also contributes to improving health and safety in the Volkswagen workplace and to implementing our targets for reducing energy and water consumption, waste, VOCs and CO₂ emissions.