Winning Year: 2011, 2010
Industry: Government
Location: Nürnberg, Germany
Website: www.arbeitsagentur.de
Employees: 95,900; Percentage over age 50: 35.2
Employees at Germany's federal employment agency, Bundesagentur für Arbeit (BA), benefit from a wide variety of flexible work arrangements and long-term working time accounts that provide opportunities for extended leaves of absence. These options are especially beneficial to older workers caring for family members or transitioning into retirement. BA also regularly re-employs retired staff members with specific skill sets for special projects. More recently, BA launched a "family service," which offers caregiving consulting as well as emergency day care services.
See also: How the 2011 Best Employers winners were selected.
Lifelong Learning and Training: Managers conduct annual performance and development dialogues with each employee. This dialogue serves to determine the status of the employee's competencies and shows additional development opportunities. Individualcareer ambitions and life plans are taken into account explicitly.
In addition, BA regularly carries out a differentiated age structure analysis in order to optimize staff planning.
The BA's long-term working hours accounts are another essential element of lifelong learning. The concept allows an employee to accumulate up to 200 hours each year that can be used for earlyretirement, phased retirement, sabbaticals, training, and family caregiving responsibilities.
Flexible Work Arrangements: Five hundred flextime models are in use. Part-time employment, including in leadership positions, as well as telework have enjoyed a strong uptake. Telework is especially open to employees with family burdens (caring for children, old or disabled persons). Over 3,400 employees make use of it.
The teleworking option now is explicitly open to older employees in a later phase of their professional career to promote employability and jobsatisfaction of this target group in particular. The target group of employees on long-term sick leave (more than six weeks) has been added as a means of integration management. The BA has introduced this opportunity to be able to respond quickly to special personal or family-related requirements.
The BA launched a professional family service in 2011. It provides employees with:
- Information and consulting on childcare as well as care of relatives
- Support benefits in care situations and placement of childcare
- Emergency care when the regular care suddenly becomes unavailable.
Health Promotion and Protection: The BA's in-house healthmanagement system (BGM) takes a preventive approach that promotes personal responsibility and initiative. Fields of activity include occupational safety, health promotion, and integration management for long-term sick employees.
Other campaigns to promote a healthy lifestyle include:
- Special theme health days
- Screenings and eye tests
- Massage treatment at the workplace
- Stress management trainings
- Initiatives to stop smoking
- A screen saver with exercises for the workplace
In 2011, the central health working group is focusing on the themes of absentee management, mental stress at the workplace and psychological disorders.
Diversity Promotion: Current diversity activities include:
- An action program to reach the 8.7 percent target quota for severely disabled employees (current quota 8.5 percent)
- Regular information campaigns to sensitize managers and staff to diversity topics
- Diversity management is integrated in the BA's internal training and in courses
- Meetings with the target groups of our fields of action on a regular basis to foster direct exchange. This is an important way for BA to gain insights for its HR policy. Afterwards BA systematically discusses these insights with senior executives in order to promote and sensitize for the prevailing field of action.
Recruitment: Job advertisements aimed at university graduates state explicitly that a "comparable qualification" in the form of many years' vocational experience in the respective area will be regarded as of equal value and can replace the formal qualification. This way, the BA expresses its appreciation of the vocational and life experience of older applicants. The older applicants' equality of opportunity is guaranteed in the framework of internal recruitment as well.
This year the BA has added the "employment quota for older employees" to the list of business goals for its internal HR services. The target quota is for 10 percent of all externally recruited employees to be older than 50 years. In 2009, the employment quota of persons over the age of 50 was 7.75 percent.
BA makes use of the specialist knowledge of older employees who have already retired. For special projects/situations, it is possible to recruit former employees for a limited period. One example is the initiative "Taking the Lead", which we started to strengthen the management capability of team leaders. Older or retired persons are part of the trainer team, in order to pass on their experiences as team leaders to younger team leaders.
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