Recruiting talents and keeping them inspired long-term
GRI 404-2
Well-qualified and dedicated employees play a crucial role in our company’s long-term success. We want to retain experienced employees long-term, and get motivated next-generation professionals excited about our company. This requires flexible talent management that meets the current challenges of the labour market, makes career opportunities transparent, and opens up interdisciplinary paths. We succeeded in doing this with the implementation of the ‘Talent Navigator’. Consolidating our job descriptions into simple, cross-departmental role profiles reveals career paths and development opportunities, and offers better orientation for employees and managers. The Talent Navigator transparently maps our job architecture, including all relevant information, and is therefore an elemental component of our HR work. It is stored in our digital talent management platform ‘myTrack’, allowing managers, employees and HR can access it at any time for purposes of personnel development. The role profiles provide them with clear orientation in recruiting, in managing performance and potential, in determining salaries, planning succession, and general staff development.
To recruit new talent for our company, our University Marketing team not only talks to potential recruits at job fairs and other hiring events, but also gives them a way to gain first-hand insight into the Tchibo world of work. On the occasion of the Hamburg Company Tour 2017, we once again invited around 100 students to the company and gave them the opportunity to experience Tchibo’s working atmosphere and corporate culture up close and personal.
We meet the growing requirements arising from the dynamic market environment with customer-focused, future-oriented solutions, to which junior staff repeatedly make contributions. We continued our Young Talent Challenge in 2017. Around 20 young talents – including apprentices, students, trainees, young managers, and participants of the Cross-Company Programme – had the opportunity to complete a two-month programme that was integrated into the Tchibo workaday routine. The team used new, agile methods to develop ideas for tackling challenges faced by various departments.
Promoting the next generation: Finding the specialists and executives of tomorrow
Tchibo is an important company in the vocational training community. We offer a wide range of apprenticeships - mainly in commercial and technical professions. We make it a priority for apprentices to learn to work independently and to assume responsibility. In 2017, for example, 19 trainees took over the complete management of a Tchibo shop during our ‘Apprentice Week’: in Bielefeld, Münster and Eisenach. In workshops, they developed shared objectives, planned specials, drew up schedules and adopted ‘team rules’.
Our trainee programmes serve to secure long-term talent and systematically train our junior (management) staff. The programmes are not static, but are developed and adjusted according to requirements and changes. In 2017, e.g., we developed a new trainee programme in the field of IT and redesigned a number of other programmes, making them even more strategic. As part of this realignment, in 2017 a trainee had the unprecedented opportunity to spend three months abroad at the Ipanema Coffee Farm. In 2017, we were able to recruit eight new trainees for Tchibo in the Marketing Coffee, Controlling/Corporate Management, Supply Chain Management & Logistics and IT departments.
Performance reviews: Systematic staff development
Regularly giving employees transparent feedback about their performance, pointing out their prospects at the company, and providing systematic support in their self-directed professional development – we see all of these as key aspects of contemporary staff development. We create an effective framework for this and offer opportunities for regular dialogue with feedback, target-achievement, and target-setting meetings between employee and manager as equal partners. TRACKS, our performance management process, always serves as the basis for this.
With the myTrack digital platform for talent management, Tchibo had already introduced integrated talent management software for the systematic promotion of our employees in 2016. myTrack not only helps employees manage the process, but also sends reminders for all upcoming tasks, and gives insight into all relevant data at all times. TRACKS, meanwhile, enables us to differentiate performance more clearly, give greater visibility to talent at Tchibo, and supporting them even more systematically. We also actively involve employees in the appraisal process by encouraging them to submit a self-assessment and learn to reflect on their role and achievements over the past year in the run-up to their appraisal interview. In 2017, more than half of the employees actively participated in the process by doing this.
Tchibo CAMPUS: self-directed, sustainable learning
Our working world is constantly changing – and so are the requirements and tasks in our company. The professional and personal development of our employees and managers is therefore very important to us and contributes crucially to our competitiveness. We provide a wide range of development opportunities through our company's central learning platform, Tchibo CAMPUS. With its broad range of offerings, we encourage our employees to design their own learning journey and continuously acquire new experience and knowledge.
The results of our CAMPUS survey ‘How do you learn best?’, in which 400 employees and 100 managers took part, were a key influencing factor in developing the 2017 range. On this basis, we developed an offer that contains new, contemporary topics and practice-oriented formats as well as tried-and-tested content and tools. For example, the formats now involve smaller learning units and are distributed over a longer period of time. This, along with their practical relevance, enables participants to learn in a more self-reflective way and with reference to their workaday routine.
Also, in designing the Tchibo CAMPUS offerings we primarily focused on the new challenges that our company – and all its managers and employees – face as a result of digitalisation, because digitalisation is rapidly and radically changing our working environment. Accordingly, many of our learning offers focused on digitalisation and ‘New Work’. For example, Dr Willms Buhse – author, entrepreneur and digital leadership consultant –sensitised more than 200 Tchibo employees to the challenges and success factors of digitalisation. In training sessions, employees were able to get to know and try out agile working methods. Our classes for executives on agile leadership and mindset made the changing leadership principles tangible and stimulated a rethink.
Digitalisation wasn’t just a topic covered at Tchibo CAMPUS. The CAMPUS itself practiced digitalization and migrated to the myTRACK digital platform. This means that up-to-the-minute offers, reviews by participants, and the availability of free places for our employees are now visible at a glance. A new addition is the eLibrary, with more than 700 e-books available for free download. CAMPUS also offers a way to share digital learning sources with colleagues with the ‘Collections’ feature in myTRACK.
In addition to new content and formats, proven offerings continue to be an important component of CAMPUS, to promote the self-directed development of everyone in the company. For example, the two-day introductory event ‘Presenting: Tchibo’ for new hires continues to take place twice a year. About 60 new employees get to know various departments, their jobs, and Tchibo's business processes in a hands-on way by participating in a company treasure hunt.
Our management development also follows the approach of self-directed, sustainable learning. For example, we support our next-generation managers with the six-month ‘Learn to Lead’ programme, which helps them build personal networks and expand their skills. New managers go through the ‘Leading People’ programme, in which they learn the tools of leadership, among other things. We also offer a new format: the 360-degree feedback process, in which colleagues, employees, superiors, customers and external business partners all provide feedback to the managers. This ‘all-round view’ gives each individual manager the opportunity for self-reflection and a very individual design of the development path. Another new feature at CAMPUS is the management workshop, where managers can share their challenges and jointly develop creative solutions in moderated, collegial consultancy sessions. In addition, a new chapter was added to the ‘Handbook for Managers’, which provides answers to fundamental management questions. ‘Transition coaching’ is a coaching process in which employees who take on a new leadership role can choose to be accompanied by a personnel development professional.