Husum – For the past 10 years “Top Job”, a nationwide corporate benchmarking competition, has identified and awarded outstanding Human Resources achievements in German mid-range enterprises. In the competition’s anniversary year the project developer WKN AG has been admitted to the ranks of Germany’s outstanding employers and conferred the “Top Job” quality seal by mentor Wolfgang Clement at the Duisburg-Nord Landscape Park.
Founded in 1990, the company employs some 200 staff worldwide from 15 nations who design and construct wind and solar energy farms – from the initial idea to the erection and commissioning of turn-key projects. The project developer’s team puts special emphasis on merging economical and ecological principles because sustainable energy farms made by WKN AG are at the same time economically viable investments. In this pursuit the Executive Board and staff are jointly driven by the vision to further reinforce the company’s position as one of the leading developers in the energy business. To translate this vision into reality the Executive Board continuously involves and integrates all staff members in ongoing business processes. Besides regular staff meetings, an international Intranet platform and team meetings serve to present future entrepreneurial scenarios and forthcoming steps.
The WKN executives have a keen interest in achieving the long-term loyalty of existing and new talent. Therefore the Executive Board attaches great importance to a well-functioning system for staff training and development, among others. Such training opportunities include, for instance, in-house seminars on time management as well as self-management focusing on raising awareness of time, careful planning and setting of objectives, methods on prioritizing as well as strategies to identify and eliminate time thieves and encouraging structured approaches. Furthermore, the company offers its employees the opportunity to participate regularly in external expert seminars. All that and much more goes down well with the staff: “Flexible working hours, an open office climate and the good feeling that we all pull together,” is how Lynn Ackermann, Group Leadership of the Assistance Pool, positively evaluates her daily work at WKN AG. “But that’s not all: I also really enjoy dealing with the numerous international colleagues and the exciting industry per se.”
WKN had successfully mastered the challenges presented by the scientific two-stage process of the Institute for Leadership and Human Resource Management of St. Gallen University. The central part of the survey conducted by the institute’s director Professor Dr. Heike Bruch was an online employee survey. At the same time, the HR managers of the companies taking part provided information about their jobs. “We are very pleased to have been conferred the “Top Job” quality seal. In addition to the award itself the anonymous employee survey provides very helpful approaches for the continuous development of our corporate culture,” reports Petra Schmölz, Head of Human Resources.
On the average, 359 employees work for Germany’s 94 best SME employers. Almost one third of the 2012 “Top Job” companies is a family business. The fact that these include 14 world market leaders and 21 national market leaders proves that good employers also enjoy economic success. Consequently more than half of the companies remunerate their employees above the standard rate.
