The company discloses what goals it has set and what measures it has taken to promote the employability of all employees, i.e. the ability of all employees to participate in the working and professional world, and in view of adapting to demographic change, and where risks are seen.
Continuous feedback is important for the personal development of our employees. In addition to the daily feedback on performance, we rely on the Group-wide structured appraisal interview, which takes place once a year with each employee. The interview is a constructive dialogue based on partnership between the employee and his or her superior. The mutual feedback gives both parties a deeper insight into each other's work and professional ideas. At the same time, the interview shows the employee his strengths and areas of development. We want to promote and understand lifelong learning as an important element of our employee development and as a central element in the implementation of our personnel strategy.
HOCHTIEF focuses on further training to qualify employees for current and future tasks. With institutions such as the HOCHTIEF Academy and Turner University, we offer a wide range of development opportunities in this area - for our young colleagues as well as for employees with many years of professional experience. The offer is possible both directly at the workplace and through an extensive, demand-oriented further training programme. Among other things, they impart know-how in various specialist areas, on occupational safety topics or offer opportunities for personal development. This enables our employees to receive comprehensive further training in all areas.
Our goal is to identify and promote our talents through our offerings, for both expert and management careers. Through our training facilities, we ensure that all employees - from trainees and experts to managers - can further develop their professional, methodological and personal skills. Overall, our employees continued their training for an average of 20.5 hours in 2018 (2017: average of 24 hours). We have thus clearly exceeded our target of at least 13 hours. In the coming years, we want to keep the average number of training hours per employee per year at a high level.
This year we offered new event series, such as a training series for site managers, which complements the existing project manager training. In addition, HOCHTIEF Engineering and HOCHTIEF Infrastructure launched a joint initiative for design managers and project managers at the beginning of 2017. In this qualification measure, participants are taught new knowledge about planning, coordination and control processes. Our subsidiary Flatiron also launched a project series for project management executives in the year under review. CIMIC also launched a revised leadership program involving executives from Australia and Hong Kong.
In the year under review, 34 young people in Germany began training with us. The proportion of trainees is 2.7 percent as of December 31, 2018, with a total of 94 trainees (2017: 94).
Opportunity and risk situation in the HOCHTIEF Group: Employees
All employees contribute decisively to HOCHTIEF’s business success. In this connection, our human resources strategy delivers a valuable contribution to the HOCHTIEF corporate strategy. While competition for good employees has become significantly fiercer, HOCHTIEF is successful in meeting its demand for qualified staff. It nonetheless remains our goal to continue enhancing our positive image and attractiveness as an employer for different target groups and skill profiles. Furthermore, we want to develop and make optimum use of our workforce potential. If we are able to exceed our expectations in this regard with a significant and lasting increase in workforce qualification levels, this will have a positive impact on our business performance.
For early detection of potential personnel risks, we
have established risk management in the human resources function based on our risk guide. Since January 2014, a systematic survey has captured major risk categories such as skill, motivation, staff turnover, and succession risk together with the potential impacts on HOCHTIEF. The risk management classification scheme in human resources is regularly reviewed for new risks and adapted as necessary.
Based on the most recent surveys, we classify personnel risk as low.