Development and Prospects
One of the basic principles for our People & Organizational Development work is “we make people successful.” In our dynamic, constantly changing market, our employees have to take responsibility both for their work and for their personal development. We are convinced that their motivation and determination to succeed depends on their ability to see and pursue individual prospects for themselves. Individual employees’ knowledge also grows our organizational knowledge as a whole. For example, keeping up with the state of the art in the areas of information security and software development protects our technology lead, while professional customer care enhances customer satisfaction.
We therefore invest in wide-ranging learning and development measures and ensure our employees grow in line with the functions they perform. Activities here are based on their individual “development journeys”. These are agreed during annual staff performance reviews and their implementation is then monitored over the course of the year.
Among other things, staff development plans include the skills needed to perform upcoming tasks, suitable on-the-job or off-the-job measures, and employees’ personal development wishes and preferences. This reinforces employees’ readiness to take responsibility for themselves and willingness to learn, and ensures they can learn new things at every stage of their development. Our proactive feedback culture and 360-degree feedback process supports continuous learning and development. A large proportion of the Company’s workforce has the opportunity to take part in these performance reviews using a structured, systematic process and to obtain additional feedback themselves. In addition, managers in the independently run companies in particular hold individual development reviews with employees.
We benchmark the success of our learning measures using a mix of tracking satisfaction with development opportunities, measuring our “return on education,” evaluating how measures have been implemented at the individual employee level during the next performance review, and cost control metrics.
1&1 Campus
Our central training portal, 1&1 Campus, bundles internal training and e-learning offerings, giving staff quick and easy access to development opportunities within the organization. 1&1 Campus offers employees from all areas of the organization a wide range of training options in the areas of methodologies, soft skills, and professional knowledge. We assess all courses for participant satisfaction and recommendation rates to ensure we are continually improving our offering. The KPIs produced suggest they are of an extremely high quality. In addition to the courses offered by People & Organizational Development, the range also includes training designed for segment-specific customer care units, plus seminars taken from our technical training catalog, our TEC Campus, and our Online Marketing Campus – training offerings by and for employees.
TEC Campus
Our technical staff have extremely specific, in-depth knowledge. Our goal is to promote information sharing and joint learning here, which is why we have expanded our 1&1 Campus to include a platform offering training in tools, processes, and methodologies, along with e-learning material and presentations by staff for staff. The TEC Campus focuses on specialist technical training and presentations, including development practices, developer onboarding, and agile methodologies. This allows topics such as information security and business process management to reach a broader target audience. The TEC Campus also hosts internal conferences such as the TEC DAY or the PASK (Project/Agile/Scrum/Kanban) conference.
Talent management (“MyWayTo”, “Navigate”, and “Women explore)
We use our talent development programs for proactive personal development. Individual development plans are aligned with the target positions concerned (e.g., professional development for experts and managers in the case of “MyWayTo”). Partly as a result of these measures, we were able to fill 65.71% of management positions internally in 2021 (2020: 73.65%; 2019: 70.19%).
The “Navigate” program is designed to ensure from an early stage that highly motivated high fliers remain with the Company, and to develop their entrepreneurial mindset and skills, their powers of reflection, and their ability to give and take feedback from a very early stage.
“Women explore” gives women the opportunity to increase their visibility and profile within the Company, to network with one another, and to actively examine their strengths and their career and networking strategies.
Individual offerings
New intranet pages that were launched in 2020 give an attractive and comprehensive overview of the large number of (continuing) professional development opportunities on offer, and these were systematically enhanced and expanded again in 2021 to include current issues. This provides all staff quick and easy access to all relevant information relating to human resources development and learning. We consistently incorporate feedback from our internal customers when redesigning the pages, and hence help to promote knowledge transfer within the Group.
Function-specific Development Measures for Customer Care
Access Division
Our strong customer focus means we rely on skilled employees to provide a professional service. In keeping with this, we regularly train both our (internal) employees and staff at our (external) service providers on our products and services, and on sales methods. The more our employees know, the more confident and self-reliant they will be in dealing with customers, guaranteeing high-quality customer care.To ensure we meet this commitment to quality from the first customer contact onwards, we overhauled the training given to new call center agents in the “Learning Paths” project and put the focus on practically based content. In addition, we developed and implemented a number of different workshops and short training courses as part of the sales and quality campaigns we launched in 2020, so as to enhance external staff members’ communications skills and sales performance. A final core action item in the fiscal year was to digitalize our training and further education offerings. Key training modules were successively converted to a webinar format, and a growing number of e-learning modules published, in order to continue guaranteeing the quality of our training operations.
Applications Division
Customer care staff who serve as consultants for our retail and business customer applications have to have substantial technical expertise. Since the technologies involved are changing rapidly, they also need to keep up with the state of the art. Our training courses therefore focus not just on customer communication and sales training, but also on product and process expertise.Since 2020, we have used our employee development program – the "Strive Towards Excellence Program," or “STEP” to support the development of our colleagues in the Customer Care Operations team. This starts with their onboarding training and goes all the way through to opportunities to become personal advisors, future trainers, or managers, among other things. The new, modular program supplements our face-to-face training offering with e-learning courses and dynamic videos. The hybrid training methods make things more interesting for our team colleagues and motivate them to use 1&1 Campus (our learning platform) more actively. In addition, e-learning offerings can be used as refresher courses following training.One performance promise made by our IONOS brand is that a personal contact will be available to provide direct support for customers. In line with this, our training offering also focuses on continuous professional development for our personal consultants.
We will continue our learning journey in 2022. We are going to update our 1&1 Campus learning management software to make it easier to offer training courses and short workshops by employees for employees, and to ensure that our success story can continue by providing access to knowledge.
We are moving to centrally document the training offerings available in the individual areas, so as to make them available to a broader target group and further enhance their quality. The goal is to be able to use this central list to report more fully on the volume and types of training offered. The following table shows the figures for training and education recorded for the last three years:
Training and education hours(1)
2019
2020(2)
2021(3)
Training and education hours per year (employees)
111,634
91,171
124,799
Per capita training and education hours (employees)(4)
11.91
9.46
13.29
Training and education hours per year (service providers)
66,481
43,527
57,414
(1) The hours for employees of our service providers vary, e.g. depending on whether new service providers are currently being deployed or new products being offered, thus necessitating time-consuming basic or product training.
(2) No classroom-based training and education courses were held in 2020 because of the pandemic.
(3) Normalization of the training and education offering, and expansion of the digital training portfolio.
(4) The information relates to all United Internet Group employees: 2019: 9,374; 2020: 9,638; 2021: 9,975.
In addition, our employees attended a total of over 900 external training courses, seminars, and conferences of varying lengths during the reporting period (2020: 480; 2019: 1,000). The year-over-year increase was due to the stabilization of the pandemic situation, which allowed face-to-face events to be held again provided that hygiene policies were observed.
Links
Downloads
