Our Projects

Our innovative personnel projects represent a key factor in our corporate success. They create the space for innovative ideas on the part of our employees and make an important contribution toward added-value. Our personnel strategies are core elements of the company's social responsibility.

The Volkswagen Group defines itself as a breathing company. The whole Group places itself at the service of its customers across all time zones 24 hours a day. The Volkswagen week of 3–6 days of flexible production has become the very essence of flexibility before customers with as short and as reliable a delivery period as possible. This is also an alternative to a “hire and fire“ employment strategy.

Volkswagen has thus succeeded in coping with the rate of change in customer requirements and market developments. All process times are becoming shorter. No customer or market gets us out of breath!
 
Future incomes must be financed from added value to a greater extent. The modernisation of our remuneration systems follows this long-term strategy. The most important stages were the introduction of a stronger orientation towards results (company and performance bonus), the opening of the remuneration system for salary conversion (participation pension) and the further development of employee shares to a stock option scheme. The time asset bond also involves Volkswagen entering completely new terrain. The time asset bond allows an overall working life to be organised and financed, while at the same time providing a fund for securing employment in the future. The time asset bond can be used by the employee to document claims on Volkswagen for paid release from work. The objective is to provide the employee with the opportunity to influence the shaping of his or her overall working life, with the aim of shortening it.

The new Volkswagen pension fund makes it possible to secure company retirement provisions in spite of both the increase in life expectancy and the rising number of Volkswagen pensioners while at the same time lowering the financial burden on the corporation. The introduction of the Volkswagen pension fund has a decisive significance for reducing labour costs at the German locations. The Group pension fund offers for the first time a joint retirement provision for all the German facilities, including AUDI, VW Sachsen and VW Bank/Financial Services AG.

We are convinced that tomorrow’s world of work at Volkswagen requires a minimum level of IT skills at every workplace, in every country. IT competence is becoming humanity’s fourth cultural skill after reading, writing and arithmetic. Support in acquiring IT skills is a decisive contribution to enhance the performance of our employees and to improve the competitiveness of our Group as globalisation intensifies. The promotion of and demand for continuous learning must therefore be understood as an outstanding characteristic of social corporate responsibility.
 
Throughout the structural change in the automotive industry, we are assuming responsibility for the regions in which the Group facilities are located. Our employment research has shown that regions characterised by a high degree of “cluster formation” also present strong increases in employment. We implement this finding with our AutoVision concept. The concept aims to reduce unemployment at Volkswagen Group locations and to create a framework for further entrepreneurial activities around those locations. Opening up the regions to new industries in the long term will result in their sustained strengthening.

Our 5000 Model makes industrial work possible in Germany again: we offer 5000 additional workplaces with a monthly income of 2500 Euro plus participation in results. Business processes are being radically modernised. The criterion for working time is achieving set objectives of quality and of volumes of cars built. Employees become entrepreneurs in the company. Consistent orientation toward the customer in terms of quality, price, loyalty and speed of delivery are key elements of the concept. The 5000 Model represents an opportunity to meet the challenges of industrial work in the future and offers new potential to the "old" locations.
 
Firmly delineated tasks, pre-determined career paths and armchair careers are a thing of the past. The future belongs to widely interconnected, networked job families. These are communities of skills and competencies, which compete for their common workholder value in the company, the regions, and in global networks: for their life chances, for the development and income prospects of their jobs. Job families will offer to the individual a sense of belonging and may be compared to the guilds of old.