Well represented – employees and executives

Dialog between employees and managers is the key to a functioning partnership - and to a successful company. People can only work together and be successful together if they talk to each other.

A functioning dialog in turn requires rules, standards and, above all, elected and empowered representatives: in the works councils, the representative committees of executive staff, the committees representing employees with disabilities, and the Bertelsmann Management Representative Committee (BMRC). The latter is an international committee not mandated by law, but voluntarily set up by Bertelsmann. It complements the representative committee which was set up for executive staff in Germany. The employees also have four representatives on the Bertelsmann Supervisory Board: three of them from the works councils, the fourth is from the BMRC.

Treating one another as partners

"Nowadays– and this will become even more so in the future – success in business depends on cooperation and partnership." Reinhard Mohn wrote these words back in 1986 in his book "Success Through Partnership." And so it is only natural that our works councils have operated under this maxim for decades. While the works council represents the employees’ interests to the management, it must at the same time consider the company as whole and communicate this to employees. According to Prof. Gerald Hüther, a professor at the Universities of Göttingen, Mannheim and Heidelberg, as partners in business, both parties have clearly defined tasks. For instance, works councils should be responsible to the management for “ensuring a motivated workforce“.  So while the works council represents employee interests vis-à-vis management, it must also take into account the needs of the business as a whole and convey this to the workforce.

Proven procedures

At Bertelsmann, the pursuit of this style of consensus has resulted in the establishment of certain fixed procedures, such as the Autumn Summit - an annual meeting between the Executive Board and the Corporate Works Council, at which all critical issues are discussed openly between the employee representatives and the Executive Board.

Another proven instrument in the dialog between employee representatives and the company is the escalation procedure. It stipulates that conflicts that cannot be resolved locally between a company’s works council and its management can first be escalated to the division level, then to Group level, and from there on to the Executive Board and Corporate Works Council.