Employees

The Volkswagen Group is one of the world’s largest employers in the private sector. On December 31, 2020, we employed a total of 662,575 people, which includes the Chinese joint ventures. This figure represents a 1.3% decrease compared with the end of 2019. The ratio of Group employees in Germany to those abroad remained largely stable over the past year; at the end of 2020, 44.4 (44.3)% of the workforce worked in Germany.

Human resources strategy and principles of the human resources policy

With the functional area strategy for Human Resources – “Empower to transform” – the Group is continuing with key and successful approaches in its human resources policy. These include the pronounced stakeholder focus in corporate governance, comprehensive participation rights for employees, outstanding training opportunities, the principle of long-term service through systematic employee retention and remuneration that is fair and transparent. At the same time, the new human resources strategy is setting innovative trends. Hierarchies are being dismantled, and modern forms of working such as agile working – an approach whereby most of the responsibility for the work organization is transferred to the teams – are set to be expanded.

In the Human Resources division, we are guided within the framework of our strategy by five overarching objectives:

  • The Volkswagen Group, including all of its brands and companies, aims to be an excellent employer worldwide.
  • Highly competent and dedicated employees strive for excellence in terms of innovation, added value and customer focus.
  • A forward-looking work organization ensures optimal working conditions in factories and offices.
  • An exemplary corporate culture creates an open work environment that is characterized by mutual trust and collaboration.
  • The Company’s human resources work is highly employee-oriented, strives for operational excellence, and yields strategic value-added contributions.

During the implementation of our future program TOGETHER 2025+, we paid particular attention in the reporting period to the level of achievement regarding the goals set by the applicable strategic KPIs. For the passenger car-producing brands, we compile and analyze the following information:

  • Internal employer attractiveness. This indicator is determined by asking respondents, as part of the opinion survey, whether they perceive the respective company as an attractive employer. The target for 2025 is 89.1 out of a possible total of 100 index points. A score of 88.2 index points was achieved in the reporting period, contrasting with 85.6 points in the previous year. The scope of this survey extends beyond the brands that manufacture passenger cars.
  • External employer attractiveness. The ability to recruit top talent is of decisive importance, particularly in view of the Company’s transformation into one of the world’s leading providers of sustainable mobility solutions and the associated development of new business fields. We use this strategic indicator once a year to check the positioning of the major passenger car-producing brands on the labor markets for graduates. Rankings in surveys conducted by renowned institutions, in which we aim to achieve top scores for the Group brands featured, serve as the basis for this. The Porsche and ŠKODA brands fully met and partly exceeded their targets in fiscal year 2020, while Volkswagen Passenger Cars, Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, SEAT and Audi missed or only partially achieved them.
  • Diversity index. Given the cultural diversity in our global markets and the growing economic momentum, success in a highly competitive marketplace requires an ever-wider range of experience, world views, solutions to problems and product ideas. The diversity of our workforce provides potential for innovation in this area, which we aim to make even better use of in future. As we establish diversity management across the Group, this strategic indicator expresses the development of the proportion of women in management and the internationalization of top management as a percentage of the active workforce worldwide. In particular, it underpins the objective of the human resources strategy, which is aimed at contributing to an exemplary leadership and corporate culture. The proportion of women in management amounted to 15.3% in 2020 and was one percentage point up on the prior-year level. We aim to raise this figure to 20.2% by 2025. Our goal is to increase the level of internationalization in top management, the uppermost of our three management tiers, to 25.0% in 2025; in the past fiscal year this was 18.7 (18.4)%.

One strategic indicator has been defined for the financial services business:

  • External employer ranking. This involves taking part in external benchmarking, in general once every two years. The aim is to position ourselves as an attractive employer and derive appropriate measures to achieve a ranking among the top-20 employers by 2025, not just in Europe, but globally. Volkswagen Financial Services AG was represented in various national and international best-employer rankings the last time it participated in 2019. Coming in 11th place, it was among the top European employers in the “Great Place to Work” employer competition.

The implementation of our Group strategy TOGETHER 2025+ has been accompanied by a work package that we defined with the Excellent Leadership module under the slogan “Accelerate the transformation” to drive the change towards an open, cooperative, diverse management culture that places emphasis on acting with integrity. Communication and collaboration will be improved across the brands and regions, open, partnership-based and value-based leadership will be intensified, management development and training will undergo fundamental change, and an even more systematic approach to succession planning will be taken so that the Group has the right people available for the right positions. In 2020, we overhauled our staff development system in line with our business requirements and introduced scouting day management, a new selection procedure that will enable us to identify suitable talent for selected functions in specialist or executive management objectively, accurately and promptly. Individual responsibility, transparency and greater practical relevance already characterize the career paths leading to management; the evaluation of talented candidates addresses employees from different levels of the hierarchy.

To master the challenges of the transformation, the Group and the employee representatives have signed agreements for the future that will position the Group’s individual brands more efficiently and also structure employee career prospects. The Volkswagen Passenger Cars brand’s roadmap for digital transformation is one example, as is the Audi brand’s Audi.Zukunft agreement, both of which were refined in fiscal year 2020.

We are also driving large-scale cultural change to achieve greater openness and transparency in line with our corporate strategy. The seven Volkswagen Group Essentials define the shared underlying values and the foundation for cultural change across all of the brands and companies:

  • We take on responsibility for the environment and society.
  • We are honest and speak up when something is wrong.
  • We break new ground.
  • We live diversity.
  • We are proud of the work we do.
  • We not me.
  • We keep our word.

Group-wide activities such as team dialog and the role model program encourage employees to analyze the Group Essentials and incorporate them into all work processes. In the role model program, managers from all brands improve the corporate culture together with their staff.

EMPLOYEES BY MARKET
in percent, as of December 31, 2020
Employees by market (pie chart)