Training and professional development for all employees

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:

• (Junior) managers with a special need for guidance in the leadership role as well as effective management tools
• Project group members with higher needs for adaptability
• Employees with the task of conducting sensitive discussions in a solution-oriented and respectful manner

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.

In 2021, we conducted a total of 14 in-house group training courses, some of which consisted of modules that build on one another. A major focus in 2021 was on supporting our (primarily junior) managers, another focus was in the training of multipliers for work techniques in the virtual working world. In addition, 40 individual training measures (external training plus individual coaching) were carried out, resulting in around 333 hours of paid training time. In total, more than 1,630 hours of paid training time were completed in 2021, an average of 2.7 per person at VAUDE. Women completed an average of 3.0 hours, men 2.2 hours.

In addition to our inhouse training programme, there are numerous opportunities for our employees to inform themselves about the basics as well as highly specialized topics of sustainability management. Those are communicated in the context of our biennial sales meetings, our unique „Green Shape Campus“ event, or the projects of the VAUDE Academy for sustainable business. While aimed at commercial partners, networking partners such as associations and initaitives, and our VAUDE Academy´s consulting customers, our own collegues can often join the (sometimes digitally conveyed) events and let themselves be inspired or brought up to date by our sustainability experts. Due to the decentralized management of those events, we are not yet able to exactly analyze the participation of VAUDE employees in those events.

** Employee categories:

• Category 1: upper management – executive board, executive management and division management
  
• Category 2: middle management – all division managers
• Category 3: lower management – all team leaders
• Category 4: all other permanent employees (permanent = open-ended contract), all employees with a limited contract
• Category 5 apprentices, interns, dual study students, trainees

For the first time, the 2021 figures include both in-house training courses conducted at VAUDE and external training courses for individuals, which VAUDE supports financially and by paying wages.

On the basis of individual agreements – and within the framework of the budgets reserved for each purpose – 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, In 2021, a total of 32 external training courses were completed by our employees, ranging from half-day motivational workshops to higher education courses of study – with correspondingly varying levels of time investment. We estimate paid time off during regular working hours to be 320 hours. This is a huge increase compared to 2020, when we estimated paid individual training time at 60 hours. We attribute this to the effect of the Corona pandemic in 2020, due to which fewer events took place, but we also see that individual measures for company training are becoming significantly more important and are agreed upon significantly more often between employees and their managers. Due to the fact that many of our employees work with trust-based working hours, the proportion of paid training time to voluntary training time cannot always be precisely defined, which is why we sometimes work with estimates.

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.

In addition to expanding our repertoire of methods for continuing education, we also recognize the rising use of digital collaboration as an important learning environment. Successfully using online channels for future professional development is a priority.

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.I n 2021, we worked with junior staff preferably on site whenever possible.

As in 2020, video conferencing was also used extensively to fully integrate the 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.