Our continuing education activities also give our employees a chance to exchange information and develop relationships. These training opportunities are available to all employees via our social intranet. These cover a broad spectrum: communicating our vision and values, technical and industry knowledge, business management content, self-management, communication and collaboration. Specific groups of employees can also take advantage of highly targeted, needs-specific training courses and advanced training for methodological skills. Examples include:
In this way, we want to sustainably strengthen our culture of trust and enable all employees to play an active, responsible role in shaping our organization. One important aspect is raising awareness of our own role in this context – for example, we rely very much on managers being role models and multipliers.
»Our positive understanding of human nature is an important pillar of our corporate culture. The ability to give and take as equals both requires and strengthens our mutual trust.«
See also Trust as the foundation
** Employee categories:
The results are far reaching, especially when it comes to qualifying employees for advancement (e.g. business administration courses run by the chamber of industry and commerce and comparable courses), which enable our dedicated professionals to fill positions that are higher up the ladder within the company. On the basis of individual agreements - and within the framework of the available resources - we finance these advanced training courses partially or in full and grant paid leave from work in some cases beyond the statutory entitlement to training time. Currently, 12 - 15 employees are taking part in external professional development courses each year, ranging from half-day motivational workshops to higher education courses of study – with correspondingly varying levels of time investment. We estimate the proportion of paid time off during regular working hours at around 60 hours per year. Since no binding company-wide reporting process has yet been established for individual training, we can only provide estimates at this stage.
As an intensive opportunity for individualized advanced development, we offer individual coaching sessions in which a small circle of external coaches support us; we have been working together with these coaches on a trust-based level for years. Approximately 10 employees benefit from this annually.
Giving and receiving constructive feedback is firmly anchored in our understanding of good leadership; our culture of trust creates the foundation that we start from – the understanding that every person intuitively wants to do his or her best. When errors happen, we analyze the underlying conditions together and use the information to find ways to improve and avoid them in the future.
Once per year at the beginning of the new academic year, we have “Azubi-Tage” to prepare our trainees for their time together at VAUDE. For three days, our trainees gain experience outdoor recreation, get to know each other, participate in team building exercises and become familiar with the essence of the VAUDE Spirit that will accompany them throughout coming years.
During their training period at VAUDE, they regularly attend feedback sessions with our consultant for personnel development, where they cover issues of academic performance, work at VAUDE and commitment within the VAUDE Community.
In addition to the job-specific training content, VAUDE offers a extensive insight into the company's sustainability activities as part of the training. For example, trainees can regularly work on projects related to sustainability issues and thus make a special mark.
In general, we consider personal contact and the experience of the physical workplace to be important prerequisites for sound and motivating training . Until 2019, home office options for trainees were only an exception. In 2020, when on-site training would have been difficult to justify, we used all digital means available to us, video conferencing in particular, to fully integrate trainees into their workplaces and provide them with important insights into their work. At times ,when the pandemic situation was moderate, we gave priority to supervising trainees in line with our requirement that employees should only work on site when urgently necessary, naturally in compliance with strict hygiene regulations.
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Apprenticeship training under new conditions
Closely connected even at a distance – Digital exchange is also proving its worth for our trainees. Home office video conferencing supplements our indispensable in-person training program . |
| GRI: | 103-1 |
| GRI: | 103-2 |
| GRI: | 404-1 |
| GRI: | 404-2 |
| GRI: | 404-3 |
