Global Compact International Yearbook Ausgabe 2011

Best Practice
Labour Standards
Deutsche Telekom
Deutsche Telekom
Introduces Women’s Quota
Deutsche Telekom has been the first DAX 30 company to establish a quota for women: By
the end of 2015, 30 percent of upper and middle management positions in the company are
to be filled by women. This is a Group-internal requirement and applies worldwide. René
Obermann, Chairman of the Board of Management of Telekom, summed it up as follows:
“Taking on more women in management positions is a matter of social fairness and, above
all, a categorical necessity for our success. Having a greater number of women at the top will
simply enable us to operate better.”
By Mechthilde Maier
We firmly believe that our company will
benefit from having more women in
management. Extensive research shows
that mixed teams are not only more innovative
but also more productive and
more successful in business. Companies
with a large proportion of female managers
generate new cultural and financial
value. Studies confirm that companies
with a higher percentage of women
achieve significantly better results and
greater profitability. What is more, investors
and funds are increasingly looking
for sustainable business practices that
include gender equality. These are concrete
economic arguments for putting
more women in management positions.
Women remain underrepresented at
all management levels of our company.
Compared with the other DAX 30 companies,
the numbers at Telekom are average.
In the last decade, the percentage of
women at the top management level in
large German enterprises has only risen
from around 5 percent to just under
5.8 percent. At Telekom, 9.6 percent of
upper management positions were filled
by women in 1996. Today, this stands
at 12.5 percent.
Although Telekom has spent many years
initiating and implementing extensive
measures designed to promote the interests
of women, this did not bring the
success we had hoped for. The “glass ceiling”
could not be broken, which is deeply
unsatisfactory. For this reason, we have
now decided to take another approach
by making a binding commitment. This
is down to the fact that traditional roles,
entrenched hierarchies, old boys’ networks,
and ingrained mentalities cannot
be changed by good intentions alone. We
have learned this from the past.
We believe the women’s quota is also
the right response to the medium-term
development we are seeing on the labor
and talent market. Already, more
than half of all business graduates from
German universities are women. We
can already expect a future shortage of
specialist workers, which will impact
the economy and thus also the business
world. One example of this: The OECD
states that, in the year 2020, there will
probably only be seven young engineers
for every ten engineers approaching retirement.
Unless companies get actively
involved in making sure this is not the
case, these seven female engineers will be
rarities. The biggest challenges lie firstly
in getting girls interested in and encouraging
them to pursue mathematics and
science-based subjects, and secondly in
making young women aware of the vast
range of career opportunities open to
them in business. These are precisely the
objectives of our diverse range of STEM
initiatives, which are already in full
swing. The women’s quota sends out a
clear signal to females that they can start
their careers with Telekom. This will also
make the quota commitment a key part
of our strategic workforce restructuring
activities. It will help us greatly expand
our talent pool in a meaningful, fair, and
sustainable effort to win tomorrow’s
young management hopefuls.
Following the resolution on the quota,
Telekom is now focusing on its implementation,
which is being done systematically
and steadfastly. All aspects of the
talent chain – from young trainees to
management reviews for positions in
leadership – have been assigned target
figures. For example, we have defined
targets for recruitment of university
graduates, for selection processes, for
talent pools, and for participation in
executive development programs. Over
the next few years, Telekom envisages
that the percentage of female graduates
from cooperative degree programs and
university leavers in technical subjects
recruited worldwide will be twice as high
as the quota of women graduates overall
in these fields in Germany.
Potential assessments, selection processes,
and development forecasts must
take place openly and transparently.
When filling management positions
at Telekom in the future, women must
make up at least 30 percent of the applicants
shortlisted.
Since November 2008 Mechthilde
Maier is Head of Group Diversity
Management at Deutsche Telekom.
But this is all an exercise in futility if
no solution is provided to the overriding
question of how women and men
can achieve a healthy work-life balance.
This is why we have substantially extended
the support we offer in-house
with childcare and care for the elderly.
By actively maintaining contact with
employees during parental leave, and
using individual reintegration measures,
we are also making the transition back to
working life easier for women and men.
We have just introduced a policy designed
to increase acceptance of – and
even expressly encourage – leadership
on a part-time and remote basis in order
to maintain a healthy work-life balance.
After all, a part-time leadership model is
also an excellent HR development tool.
It enables executives working part-time
to systematically mandate junior talent
with taking on increasing leadership
responsibility locally. Last but not least,
greater control over working hours also
calls for a second policy, which we have
just introduced. This sets out rules on
the use of and attitudes toward mobile
work resources outside of normal working
hours.
Internal and external reactions to the
women’s quota at Telekom indicate that
the Board of Management’s decision to
introduce a quota was the right one. In
the future, a lot of able, well-qualified
women will have significantly better career
prospects with our company and will
occupy a larger proportion of positions
in leadership. We will only have reached
our ultimate goal when the women’s
quota becomes redundant. It will be
some time before this happens but we
have now taken the first big step.
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