Our staff play a significant role in meeting and often exceeding the expectations of our customers and investors. It is vital, therefore, that we invest in measures to support, train and qualify employees. To ensure that they are adequately prepared for their specific duties, we make every effort to promote a systematic exchange of knowledge between members of the workforce and to enhance their skills by means of training courses and seminars.
During the year under review, we again increased our range of professional development opportunities. Throughout the world, our staff can attend a large number of workshops, courses and training modules in a wide range of subjects in order to gain further qualifications. Alongside these more traditional approaches, we also offer a variety of seminars and online modules via the Group’s live e-Training platform as a further way of providing for their professional development. The live e-Training concept also strengthens the Group’s internal communications, allowing colleagues from different countries to come together in virtual groups to hold joint conferences and training courses and to exchange knowledge and information.
In setting up a Project Management Center of Excellence, our aim was to ensure that even highly complex projects are dealt with in a professional manner and to improve the way in which we collaborate with our customers and partners outside the Group. To this end, Wincor Nixdorf provides training for its employees using a standardized and accredited program based on established standards, to equip them to handle future projects even more quickly and efficiently. In turn, this should allow us to recruit more project managers from within our own ranks and retain expertise within the organization. This program has already proven its worth in Germany, and we intend to roll it out internationally in the near future.
We place great value, too, on other programs geared towards increasing the cultural awareness of our staff. This is not only important given the international nature of our workforce but also in view of our global customer base. We offer language courses and training to broaden the intercultural skills of the workforce.
Networking and Knowledge Transfer at International Level.
We promote the exchange of experience and information on products, projects and solutions across the entire Group. With this objective in mind, in fiscal 2006/2007, we held the first International Technical Support Conference, which was attended by staff from different divisions and countries, at our headquarters in Paderborn. During the discussions, technical experts from sixteen countries focused on the optimization of products and processes from a services perspective.
This exchange between colleagues from different divisions is also facilitated by our Peer Group program, which involves bringing staff together from across the organization, to transfer and network their knowledge and to jointly develop management skills and techniques.
During the year under review, we continued our international Young Professionals staff development program, which is designed to prepare employees for management positions over the medium term.
Fiscal 2006/2007 saw the launch of Wincor Nixdorf’s Knowledge Forum, an internal communications platform created by staff for staff. Those interested can request information from their colleagues on different issues related to their work and use the Forum as a platform to discuss complex subjects. The next step will be to roll out the project internationally and thus make it available across the entire Group.
Building the Future Together.
It is Wincor Nixdorf’s creative workforce that lies behind our capacity to innovate. To let this potential unfold, we believe it is necessary to allow employees a degree of freedom and give them responsibility. We want all our staff to be committed to the ongoing process of improving efficiency, to be able to respond flexibly to our customer’s needs and to contribute towards the development of new products and services. We are open to suggestions from the workforce and welcome creative ideas and contributions that help to enhance quality and thus boost the organization’s competitiveness. During the year under review, around nine hundred proposals were submitted suggesting ways in which we can reduce costs and optimize our products and processes. Thanks to these proposals, we were able to make savings of almost €2.5 million.
In the same way, we strive to help each and every employee to be involved in the process of change within the organization. Focus groups made up of staff from different departments have been set up to solve specific problems. One example of this is the search conducted by QA teams for ways of optimizing the quality and efficiency of processes and products.
Rewarding Good Performance.
Wincor Nixdorf has a tradition of rewarding the contribution made by employees towards the success of business. This principle is a key element of our remuneration policy, which takes into account both individual performance and the Group’s results. This encourages staff around the world to give their best and identify themselves with the organization. To this end, for a large part of the workforce, the remuneration system involves a number of variable components based on the economic success of the Group and the results obtained in each area.
