One goal – one team

― Sebastian Döring, Head of Strategic HR Planning, HR Reporting

AUDI AG has set itself goals aimed at increasing or ensuring the proportion of women at all management levels and on the Supervisory Board. The share of women on the Supervisory Board amounted to approximately 30 percent as of December 31, 2020. To ensure this proportion, the Supervisory Board has established a target value of 30 percent, which went into effect on January 1, 2021, and will continue until 2025, and must be separately fulfilled by both shareholders and employees. The Supervisory Board resolved a formal target quota of 25 percent for the Board of Management also, starting January 1, 2021. There were two women on the Board of Management, also of AUDI AG at the end of 2020. AUDI AG is also striving to increase the proportion of women below the Board of Management. By the end of 2021, women should comprise 8 percent of the first management tier below the Board of Management and 16 percent in the second management tier. As part of efforts to support and facilitate the advancement of women pursuing leadership positions, AUDI AG promotes special programs such as “Sie und Audi,” in addition to flexible, innovative work models and diverse offers to enhance the compatibility of family life and work.

“At Strategic HR Planning, we address the question of what the workforce of the future might look like and outline how our transformation can succeed in the long term,” Sebastian Döring explains. “That’s why we have interlocked the HR strategy and corporate strategy more closely and systematically. We look at corporate decisions such as site occupancy, sales planning or even the personnel adjustments agreed under Audi.Zukunft and analyze them together with the divisions. And we naturally also take a close look at which new technologies or business models we’re investing in and which new jobs they will create in the future.” This means the direction in which the company is heading also influences how and in which direction the workforce needs to develop.

Strategic HR planning is an annually recurring process that incorporates new impetus from the strategy and comprises two elements: First of all, to obtain transparency of the work done at Audi, thousands of job profiles across the Group were analyzed, condensed into just over 120 job clusters (groupings) and applied to the current Audi workforce. Then the divisions drew up a target vision of their future personnel requirements based on the following three questions: Where should we invest, where should we no longer invest and what stays the same?

Once the workforce and personnel requirements have been depicted as job clusters, Audi uses simulation software to perform gap analyses. Sebastian Döring: “These analyses compare the current job clusters with our future requirements so that we can identify surpluses and shortages at an early stage and make the situation transparent. We also keep an eye on demographic influences and identify where the current early-retirement program is taking effect, for example. In the action phase, the operational HR team takes over and plans staff changes and training based on our analyses.” All of this is done in close cooperation with the Works Council, which is an important partner throughout the entire process.

One building block of the Audi corporate culture is the principle of employee participation, which is also legally based on the German Workers Co-determination and Works Constitution Acts. At Audi sites and subsidiaries worldwide, the employees are organized into independent, democratically legitimized trade unions and employee representative bodies. One advantage of co-determination from the employer’s point of view is that it motivates people – and only a motivated team will be able to achieve the transformation and build up expertise with the necessary innovative strength.

Main issues during the year under review included the joint efforts to overcome the coronavirus crisis, while focusing on protecting the health and safety of employees, and the further transformation of the company. In addition to these main issues, there was a particular focus in 2020 on further implementing Audi.Zukunft. With this general agreement, Audi is making a lasting commitment to greater efficiency, flexibility and, above all, job security with an extended employment guarantee until the end of 2029.

The sustained transformation of the automotive industry – digitalization, globalization, electrification, disruptive business models – presents major challenges for co-determination and thus for corporate culture. Works Council and trade union members, as well as the management at Audi, are called upon to take action in this area. The project “Vision Ingolstadt 2030: Digitalized work and the future of co-determination” led to the opportunity to take part in the EdA project – a joint initiative funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research entitled “Empowerment in the digital working world – developing sustainable concepts for digitalization.” A key instrument that has emerged from this project are the corporate practice laboratories. These allow the company to set up learning and experimentation spaces and to shape the transition to the digital working world together with the workforce.

One of these laboratories was launched under the umbrella of the #womendigit research lab and was tasked with examining how employees can be deployed more flexibly in shift work in the future. A cross-functional lab team is working together on this and, among other things, conducting a pilot project with part-time employees in clocked production. The aim is to develop and test innovative and sustainable concepts that will enable new ways of making working hours on the shop floor more flexible. Peter Mosch, General Works Council Chairman: “If we want to achieve more gender equality in the working world, then we have to break up old structures – including in production. To do this, we need persuasive arguments, staying power, participation and solidarity between the social partners. And the effort is paying off, as demonstrated by the new flexible working time model for people working shifts at the AUDI AG paint shop in Ingolstadt.”

A transformation calls for new key competences, since skills and training needs change fundamentally. The Audi Akademie is responsible for the training of apprentices, employees, specialists and leaders. It bundles the comprehensive range of training courses offered by the Audi Group and thus helps cement the company’s competence lead in collaboration with the divisions.

Audi invests up to EUR 80 million annually in training and developing its employees. During the year under review, the Audi Group held 13,927 (20,694) training events worldwide with 1.1 million (1.7 million) participant hours. In the same period, over 25,000 (over 33,000) employees attended one or more of the 7,291 (10,866) training events in Germany.