Employee loyalty and development

New approaches and high-performance processes in employee retention and development are crucial to the assumption of greater responsibility, cooperation and performance capability at DB Group. We are focusing on the Strong Rail strategy. We support employees in several key areas:

• Perform: “My Performance Management” focuses on honest dialog about performance with the objective of continuously encouraging promoting better performance. Based on the experience in the area of executives, the instruments “My performance” and “My incentive feedback” were further developed in the year under review and these instruments were prepared for a comprehensive rollout for about 180,000 employees, which was postponed to January 1, 2021 due to the Covid-19 crisis. With the introduction of a mandatory contribution to performance in the “Women in leadership” dimension for all executives from the level of the leading executive, “My performance” is also an important tool for achieving our target of 30 % women in leadership by 2024.
• Learning: The Group-wide offer of DB Academy and DB Training was expanded in 2020. DB Learning World has further established itself as a central learning platform.In addition to business unit-specific content, more than 165,000 registered users can access about 250 learning units on strategy, digitalization, lean management/DB excellence, and the environment and sustainability. DB Learning World provides the opportunity to learn autonomously and independently and to develop further.
• Developing and appointing: The purpose of strategic succession planning is to identify succession risks at an early stage, plan succession scenarios and speed up appointments. The succession planning should increase quality and diversity in the candidate selection, and, at the same time, employees and management should be given more guidance for their professional development within the Group. In 2020, succession planning involved about 800 roles within upper and top-level management. A pilot project was also conducted for about 25 roles within operational middle management.
• Onboarding and changing roles: When a hiring decision is made, onboarding management supports the new employee in preparing for the new tasks in the best possible way. We support onboarding management both digitally and through personal accompaniment. Intergenerational management promotes integration and mutual learning for experienced and new employees.

Employees are responsible for all of these areas and are supported by their respective managers. The compass for strong teamwork is a common benchmark for these areas. It is intended to show the direction of changing leadership, cooperation and culture within DB Group in the sense of the Strong Rail strategy. The compass is based on the five most important principles that everyone in DB Group can use in their day-to-day roles to make Strong Rail a success. The compass principles were consistently anchored in diagnostics, entry management, performance assessment, career development and qualifications. For example, the compass for strong teamwork was integrated into all management training courses and the first selection process for managers was aligned accordingly.

Further information is provided in the section Personnel development.