A healthy work-life balance
GRI 403-3
Every day, our employees meet high requirements and expectations. The basis for their commitment, performance and hence our company’s success is a working environment that promotes and maintains health and allows everyone to maintain a healthy work-life balance. As a family-owned company, our responsibility lies in providing management methods, processes and support that empower employees to maintain a healthy balance.
In 2015, we established the HR Balance team and introduced the interdisciplinary ‘Balance’ project for this purpose. It integrates our occupational health management (OHM) and all other work-life balance activities. We also gave visibility to the activities at the decentralised sites in 2017 by publishing the Balance News.
Our occupational health management works to ensure that our employees actively engage in maintaining their health. Besides various occupational health and safety measures, we offer an extensive range of preventive and promotional measures for both physical and mental health. They address topics such as nutrition, exercise, relaxation methods, and a balanced working life. In 2017, we hosted numerous OHM events, including workshops, courses, and ‘Balance’-themed evenings.
We wish to offer our employees an attractive and healthy working environment. This includes regularly checking for ergonomically correct workstation design and possible sources of stress at the workplace, for example through noise, as well as taking appropriate optimisation measures. As part of our measures to promote health, we also added the topic of ‘healthy and safe leadership’ to our handbook for managers.
For a healthy work-life balance
We are committed to our employees’ health and equilibrium. To better leverage synergies, in 2015 we established the HR Balance team and introduced the interdisciplinary ‘Balance’ project, which supports health and work-life balance. In 2017, we offered a lot of activities and information on the eight Balance core areas of My Family, My Time, My Health, My Sport, My Nutrition, My Culture, My Discounts and Balance at the sites, and worked with a health insurance provider to develop new activities for our employees.
Our corporate reintegration management (CRM) scheme supports employees who have been ill for more than six weeks in a given year with their return to work. We offer them individual, flexible workstations or working hours and also work with them to adapt their tasks as needed. The goal is to quickly and gently settle the employees in again, and make them fit for work again in the long term.
We support our employees with disabilities through our Disabilities Officer, as well as seminars and offers for dialogue. In the past seven years, we have increased the proportion of our employees with a disability to over six percent of the total workforce.
My Sport
Regular exercise is an important factor for staying mentally and physically fit and creating a healthy balance to workplace stress. We offer our employees a wide range of options, along with financial support.
Since the end of 2015, for example, we have offered the weekly ‘Active Break’– a short sequence of relaxation and strengthening and stretching exercises – at the Hamburg production site as well as in the administration building in Süderstrasse – to offset work stress. At the Hamburg headquarters we operate a leisure centre that offers about 35 courses per week, fitness equipment, a swimming pool, a large gymnasium, a squash court, a foosball table, billiard tables and table tennis, as well as a bowling alley. A break and relaxation lounge has also been redesigned, with features including massage chairs where employees can recharge their batteries. On average, around 350 Tchibo employees, family members and pensioners use the leisure centre's services every day.
At our logistics site in Gallin, we offer our employees the option of mobile massages at their workplace. Our employees in the sales force and in the Tchibo shops receive discounts, e.g. on Germany-wide fitness programmes. In 2017, Tchibo cooperated with the Gruner & Jahr publishing house to offer its employees, for the first time, a fitness programme in conjunction with a diet scheme designed by the women’s magazine brand BRIGITTE. As part of the cooperation, employees received four weeks of free participation in the BRIGITTE online diet & fitness programme and receive expert tips on exercise, motivation and regeneration.
My Nutrition
In January 2018, for example, our employees were invited to learn how to practice healthy nutrition in the daily routine in six Monday meetings at the Nordlicht restaurant. The German broadcaster NDR's ‘Nutrition Docs’ prepared healthy dishes under various mottoes. We also expanded our traditional Christmas special: on request, Tchibo employees can request a vegan alternative to the classic gift of a Christmas roast.
Facilitating a healthy work-life balance
As a family-friendly company, we support employees in achieving a healthy work-life balance. We gear our offerings to the individual needs of our employees and their requirements at different stages of their lives. We define ‘family’ to mean all domestic partnerships where social responsibility is assumed long-term. In other words, this includes parents, children, spouses/long-term partners, siblings, and grandparents.
For our commitment to a healthy work-life balance, we were the first retail company in Germany to be certified as a ‘family-conscious employer’ by berufundfamilie Service GmbH, an initiative by the non-profit Hertie Foundation. In 2013, we were recertified until August 2016, and in June 2017 we were audited and certified as a ‘family-conscious employer’ for the third time.
At our company, we apply the principle of trust-based working hours, because for us what counts is an employee’s actual performance, not the time they spend in the office. All employees, including managers, have the option of working part-time. A company agreement on working from home provides added flexibility. Job-sharing models and sabbaticals are also possible.
In the New Workplaces@Tchibo pilot project, we also created new work environments, in the form of Creative, Communication, Work and Quiet zones. The employees no longer sit at a fixed place, but choose their workstation flexibly and depending on the project they are working on. Because this concept proved its merit in the Coffee Marketing, Cafissimo and Non Food departments, in 2017 we implemented it for the Corporate Responsibility and Human Resources departments as well.
Care of children and relatives
Our ‘connection concept’ facilitates our employees’ return to work after parental leave. We also support parents with childcare, by providing 43 day-care spaces at the child-care centres we work with near the Hamburg headquarters.
We have worked closely with pme Familienservice Gmbh for many years in order to meet the various family requirements that our employees face during their working life as adequately as possible. pme Familienservice provides consultation on all childcare-related matters and helps with sourcing emergency care. Together with the holiday camp provider kidz-playground, we offer our employees holiday programmes for their children from the age of six three times a year.
pme Familienservice also advises our employees on the subject of caring for family members and helps them source care services. To provide even better assistance to our employees in reconciling work and the care of relatives, in November 2016, we introduced the position of a ‘Work and Care Compatibility Guide’ to advise our employees. The initiative for having such an officer as the first point of contact in companies was put forward by the Hamburg Alliance for Families, a consortium made up of the Hamburg Senate, Chambers of Commerce and Chambers of Trades and Crafts.