Management of employment and skills development
In 2019, we focused on a significant internationalization of our business portfolio, both Upstream and Downstream, within a disciplined financial framework. Driven by our employees, we convert energy into quality of life.
We know that it is the experience, skills, attitude, and commitment of our people at OMV that turn our strategy into reality. To unlock our organization’s full potential we have further embedded OMV’s Foundation Principles into our daily work.
OMV’s People Strategy supports the implementation of the following priorities through planned initiatives directed at supporting OMV’s growth:
Strengthening leadership capability
Strong leadership is needed to ensure that our growth is fast, profitable, and sustainable. Since 2017, we have put significant effort into strengthening the capabilities of our managers. This is still a core item on our agenda through various initiatives. For example, we broadened our leadership development opportunities by adding leadership refreshment and leadership essential courses and deepened training in all functional, technical, and business skills. In 2019, we further expanded our portfolio of leadership development programs in the area of soft skills learning and process management.
Focusing on culture and performance
Digitalization is about people and culture. That is why creating a digital mindset and reshaping the talent landscape are an integral part of OMV’s Digital Journey, as is integrating technology partners, universities, and start-ups into our activities.
Our human resources processes have been further simplified and automated in the course of digitalization. One initiative in this area was the installation of My Success Factors, a SAP-based tool that is also accessible from mobile devices and helps us improve our performance and build a digitally oriented corporate culture. The following processes are supported by My Success Factors with further enhanced performance features: goal setting, goal evaluation and feedback, development planning, succession planning, recognition, personal HR administration, and learning. For example, employees can use the tool’s feedback function to request and receive feedback from their colleagues on their performance. This feedback is directly linked to their record of achievements in the goal plan. Furthermore, a user-friendly and state-of-the-art recognition tool allows anyone to nominate a colleague or a team for an award to show appreciation with just a few clicks.
In continuation of our digitalization efforts, we launched our Digital Academy in September 2019 to prepare for the digital transformation. Implemented as part of the OMV’s Digital Journey, this set of courses aims to create a culture and environment that is receptive to innovation at all hierarchy levels of the Company organization. The Academy consists of more than 250 courses, covering everything from basic digital and function-specific digital skills to leadership skills to prepare our employees for working in a digital world. In bite-sized lessons, the courses can be attended whenever and wherever employees want. (For more details on the Digital Academy, see OMV’s digital journey.)
Increasing organizational agility
Growth is based on consistency, transparency, and standardization of our processes for managing our human capital. We are therefore continuing to integrate and consolidate our processes into a central Group-wide IT platform as part of our HR Digital Journey. We are also concentrating more on corporate management from headquarters. As the global governance and business center, headquarters will, in future, be responsible for all Group-wide Finance and HR activities as well as digitization and IT. With this step, OMV is creating more than 250 new, highly qualified jobs in Austria, where its roots lie.
Ensuring OMV remains a great place to work
Every day we strive to create an environment in which every employee can learn, grow, connect, and collaborate as well as live a safe and healthy life. We have continued to expand our training offering by adding new courses and online content for professional, business, personal, and leadership development. We also introduced a transparent and consistent system for classifying career positions with a list of criteria for each level of employment, corresponding responsibilities, and compensation and benefits.
Rights and obligations
The rights and obligations of our employees are set out in employment contracts. The vast majority of our employees, i.e., 98.9% (2018: 98.5%), have the right to exercise their freedom of association and collective bargaining. For 98.8% (2018: 99.6%) of our employees, minimum wages or salaries are fixed by law or agreed through collective bargaining agreements. Local trade unions or works councils represent 89.6% (2018: 88.6%) of our employees. In addition, 98.9% (2018: 97.8%) are covered by mandatory periods of notice under national employment laws or bargaining agreements in case restructuring of the business is necessary.