PEOPLE@PUMA
As a company, we can only reach our goals when we have the right people. We depend on finding, connecting, and developing the right talent, thereby ensuring PUMA´s future growth.
Competing for the best talent on the market, our intention is to raise awareness of PUMA as a top employer that offers challenging roles in international teams, while providing professional talent management and great development opportunities.
Diversity: Ensuring a diverse and inclusive environment
PUMA’s team spirit thrives on the diversity of people with various skills, backgrounds, and experiences. PUMA’s unique company culture reflects, embraces, and respects the individuality of every single person, while providing the opportunity for all employees to achieve their full potential. This is the key to creating effective and competitive teams that drive forward innovation and success. At our headquarters in Herzogenaurach alone, we employ people from 59 different nationalities.
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Based on this belief, we committed ourselves to the PUMA Code of Ethics (2005) and to our Diversity Charter (2010) to ensure a fair work environment and equal opportunities for all PUMA employees, regardless of their gender, nationality, ethnicity, religion, disability, age, or sexual orientation.
Last year, 86% of our employees worldwide held permanent contracts, while 41% of our people were covered by a collective bargaining agreement.
Another strength of our teams lies in the well-balanced gender distribution: Across all PUMA locations, the male to female ratio is 52 percent to 48%, a stable tendency over the past years. This shows we provide a work environment equally attractive to women and men.
At PUMA, we promote gender balance at all management levels. We continue our efforts to raise the proportion of women across all levels of management. In 2018, the groupwide percentage of women in management positions amounted to 40%.
Until the end of October 2021, we want to achieve an even more ambitious goal: We aim to have at least 30% of women on the Supervisory Board, 20% on the Management Board, while having 30% and 40% of women at the two management levels below the Management Board respectively.
Additionally, we offer women specific training and access to inspirational networks. The interaction with experienced female executives should encourage our female employees to aspire to leadership positions within the Group.
Talent management: Finding and fostering the best people
Our integrated and consistent talent management drives our performance and development culture. We identify and promote talent within teams and across functions, regardless of their job level.
This includes offering a wide range of tailored trainings to accelerate professional development towards becoming a leader, providing the required skills to manage teams.
Having implemented systematic talent conferences, we assess the entire PUMA workforce every year. Such conferences are conducted worldwide, involving all levels of management, up to and including the Management Board.
Employees are being evaluated on criteria such as individual performance and competencies, potential, ambition, career progression, and mobility. The targeted analysis of our employees’ profiles allows us not only to prepare individual development plans, but also to match internal talent with vacancies, helping us to find potential successors within the company. This process has a proven track record of attractive career and development opportunities for our employees and efficient succession planning.
Speed Up / Speed Up2
With Speed Up and Speed Up2 we provide personal development programs for employees, with the aim of preparing selected talent for the next step in their careers. Designed for upcoming or seasoned leaders, both programs offer targeted training, consisting of interdisciplinary projects and tasks, mentoring and coaching, as well as job rotations. An additional component of the Speed Up programs lies in raising the participants’ visibility at top management level, while encouraging them to build cross-functional networks.
Learning: Empowering lifelong learning
At PUMA, learning is not only part of our culture, but is a key part of our strategy to constantly train our people and offer them a development path. We support our employees in their lifelong learning, which has become a necessity in a world that changes at an ever-increasing pace.
Our efforts in learning and training include the integration of Future Champions into our workforce, along with the personal development of our employees and managers.
This way we ensure we have the right competencies available today as well as tomorrow.
Future Champions
Identifying talent at a very early stage is key to fostering the next generation of employees that will contribute to PUMA’s future success.
In this context, we offer high school graduates and students a multitude of options to start a career in a challenging international work environment.
To spot our Future Champions, we cooperate with a large range of universities and schools at an international level. Throughout the year, PUMA hosts various events specially designed for students at our international headquarters and abroad.
Empowering the next generation |
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In 2018, 15 dual-program students and trainees joined the PUMA Headquarters in Herzogenaurach. In total, PUMA had 49 apprentices and dual-progam students by the end of 2018, majoring in a range of subjects, from International Business to IT. |
In 2018, we were excited to host PUMA’s first Design Sprint, gathering Europe’s most promising design students, who got the chance to prove themselves to PUMA’s designers and Creative Directors. After two days of brainstorming, sketching, and creating drafts, the students showcased their results to PUMA top executives on the PUMA BRIDGE.
Another promising event was the Innovation Sprint, a hackathon offering students with a tech or digital background the chance to work on real cases, such as the improvement of the PUMA TRACK app.
Events like these offer students of different academic backgrounds the opportunity to look behind the scenes, get first practical experience in their domain, and learn from professionals. Some participating students were even identified for an internship.
Learn@PUMA
Beyond attracting new talent, we are committed to continuously developing our people in the best possible way.
Learning is optimized when it’s done 70% on the job, 20% by learning from others, and 10% with training and self-study. With this formula in mind, we have designed our PUMA learning program, which offers a wide range of training and workshops, either pre-defined or tailored to individual needs, both on-site and online.
In 2018, 14,884 employees worldwide participated in training courses and workshops over a total of 132,450 hours.
ILP und ILP2
At PUMA, it is a key priority to develop leaders who can navigate through complexity and master challenging experiences. Our modular International Leadership Programs, ILP and ILP2, have been set up to provide the best preparation and support for unlocking our peoples’ abilities to lead teams in our company. Conducted at a global level and across all regions, they convey a general understanding of what leadership means at PUMA, while providing the needed skills and tools to become a successful leader. With modules including “mindful leadership,” “agile working methods,” and “leading diverse teams,” we help participants to fulfill their role, while preparing them for future challenges.