The global number of employees on a yearly average was 13,348 employees in 2019 compared to 12,192 in the previous year. This increase resulted mainly from the retail area due to the increased number of own retail stores.
Personnel expenses in 2019 increased overall by 14.6% from € 553.8 million to € 634.5 million. On average, personnel expenses per employee were € 47.5 thousand compared to € 45.4 thousand in the previous year.
As of December 31, 2019, the number of employees was 14,332, compared to 12,894 in the previous year. This represents a 11.2% increase in the number of employees compared to the previous year. The development in the number of employees per area is as follows:
In a business environment undergoing rapid change, PUMA must be able to adapt quickly to new market situations to ensure success over the long term. We have therefore created a modern working environment that fosters agile thinking, creativity and interaction. We provide our employees with general working conditions and flexible working opportunities that offer them a good work-life balance. We ensure that our employees are familiar with agile working methods and encourage them to be versatile and adaptable. During this change process and the associated impact on the organization, the employee is always the focus of our actions. In order to take this into account both internally and externally, we have renamed the Human Resources department “People & Organization”.
To support our company strategy and to ensure our business success, our main focus is on acquiring and developing talent. Having and retaining highly qualified and motivated personnel in the long term is the main part of our strategy to ensure future competitiveness and growth. This becomes particularly important in an ever-changing, increasingly complex environment. We use digital platforms and social media for our target group-specific, individual recruiting measures, as well as our career website, to attract external candidates. A range of initiatives at universities gives us the opportunity to approach potential employees and identify suitable candidates. Extensive networks of qualified applicants and current candidate pools help us to quickly fill vacancies. In the competitive labor market, being an attractive employer, and being perceived as such by current and potential employees are of critical importance. Top employer rankings and multiple awards evidence PUMA’s attractiveness.
The digitalization, the related simplification and acceleration of business processes made further progress. "Workday", one of the leading human capital management systems, which we introduced globally in 2017, contains the modules "recruiting", "talent and performance", "time recording and absence management" and "learning". As a result, only one software solution is used for major parts of important personnel processes. In 2019, we continued to link Workday with other systems and have steadily increased the number of employees and applicants who regularly and actively use the system. The evaluation of our centrally available global data enables us to conduct large-scale analyses. The resulting conclusions offer a solid basis for continuous process improvement and decisions.
Our aim is to help each of our employees to develop in an international environment and at the same time successfully and sustainably retain them in our company. Based on the Workday software, a systematic succession plan is created as part of talent management in addition to the performance assessment and target-setting. We identify the talent available within the group as part of annual performance reviews and foster talent development based on individual development plans. This type of talent management means that we can offer our employees attractive career and development opportunities.
The ongoing professional and personal development of our employees also ensures that our workforce has the necessary expertise to guarantee continuous growth and market competence particularly in times of digital change. The range of training we provide therefore includes a number of online and offline training courses and workshops that are standardized or tailored to individual needs. The constant development of our PUMA training programs ensures that our employees have innovative and diverse opportunities to expand their qualifications and develop their existing skills or acquire new skills at any time. This approach helps employees to achieve their personal goals and PUMA to reach its corporate goals.
In 2019, we have started to train employees to become "agile coaches" in order to prepare and motivate our workforce for the digital change. These coaches apply agile working methods, can pass on their knowledge to other colleagues on site and are also available as experts on the subject. In addition to the management content already available on the ILP (International Leadership Program), we send our staff on external and internal training courses to qualify in agile methods such as Scrum, Design Thinking and KanBan. The high level of interest and steadily increasing numbers of staff attending these courses show that we are on the right path.
To provide adequate entry-level and development opportunities to talented individuals at all levels, including the range of different apprenticeships and dual-study programs, we also promote the systematic training of our professionals and managers.
To ensure a common understanding of leadership throughout the company, all managers complete our international leadership training program comprising the seminar series ILP and ILP2. The program helps to develop participants over a longer period, provides them with the opportunities to apply the newly acquired knowledge in practice between the individual modules and to share knowledge with other seminar participants to learn from each other. Our goal is to provide our staff with the required skills and expertise to successfully lead their teams. They receive intensive training and coaching, including interactive learning, roleplay simulations and best practice learning, as well as joint projects. The digitalization and the changing work environment lead to new challenges for managers in particular. The key topics are therefore coaching, mindful leadership and agile working methods. The training course “from employee to manager” prepares staff that are about to take on a management role for the first time. In addition to the training module, the program also offers individual coaching.
Using Speed Up and Speed Up2, we conduct development programs for employees on different levels. Various groups consisting of top talents are given intensive preparation for the next step in their careers by taking on interdisciplinary projects and tasks, targeted training courses, mentoring, and coaching as well as job rotations. Increased visibility to upper management, the creation of cross-functional cooperation and establishing a strong network are also important components of this program.
In the past year, we conducted a global employee survey with the help of the external provider Wills Towers Watson in order to get feedback from our employees and involve them in the design of their work environment. More than 9,750 employees participated and used the opportunity to share their opinion on their workplace and work life. We are proud of 91% employee engagement and appreciate the high level of commitment of our employees and their loyalty to the brand. The category “change” received the lowest positive responses with 63% and was identified as an important future area of action. The results were communicated on a global, local and departmental level and necessary improvement measures were defined.
The trust-based collaboration with the Works’ Councils is an important part of our corporate culture. In 2019, the European Works Council of PUMA SE represented employees from 15 European countries and had 18 members. The German Works Council of PUMA SE has 15 members and represents the employees of the PUMA Group in Germany. A designated member of the Works Councils represents the interests of employees with disabilities.
We at PUMA offer our employees a targeted and competitive compensation system, which consists of several components. In addition to a fixed base salary, the PUMA bonus system, profit-sharing programs and various social benefits and intangible benefits form part of a performance-based compensation system. We also offer long-term incentive programs for the senior management level that honor the sustainable development and performance of the business. The bonus system is transparent and globally standardized. Incentives are exclusively linked to company goals.
