„We are really thankful for this award and appreciate it. This is a great honour and incentive for us: I want us to be the best employer in the coming years, as well. This won’t be easy because we’re currently in the midst of the largest transformation in the history of the automotive industry. To successfully navigate this, we’ll need to rethink or reimagine our approach in many areas. A key success factor will be having the right skills in place; we are working on a wide range of programmes to upskill our employees and prepare them for the future requirements of new car manufacturing in the age of electromobility, with software as a key feature of future vehicles. With 42 Prague, we co-founded a non-profit educational institute for coding last year. We’re also advancing topics like New Work; we’re increasingly offering flexible working models, such as remote working and job sharing. We’re also focusing on diversity and inclusion, including more women in management and more internationalisation. This award motivates us to take on the next challenges together and implement them successfully!“
Maren Gräf, ŠKODA AUTO Board Member for People & Culture
„Receiving the 'Employee of the Decade' award is the natural culmination of our journey since the beginning of the cooperation between ŠKODA AUTO and the Volkswagen Group. By taking a walk through the Mladá Boleslav, Kvasiny and Vrchlabí plants, reading the Collective Agreement, visiting the social facilities, canteens, employee services, our vocational school, high school and university and looking at the range of facilities for suppliers at ŠKODA AUTO sites and services for employees' families and children, you can see how much we support culture and sport as well as social projects such as Bike for Life. Then there are the employee fundraisers supported by ŠKODA AUTO many times over and, finally, the after-retirement care for the elderly. The bottom line: the 'Employer of the Decade' is a well-deserved and justified victory, not least because we will continue to engage in and advocate for these projects.“
Jaroslav Povšík, Chairman of the KOVO trade union
The ‘Employer of the Year’ award celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. The aim of the contest is to showcase successful companies, regardless of their history, size or sector, and at the same time support the advancement of HR management in the Czech Republic. Over the past decade, the globally recognised Saratoga methodology from PricewaterhouseCoopers has been used, lending a high degree of professional credibility to the results. Among other benefits, this assessment method first compares companies within their sector and the resulting sectoral score contributes to the organisation’s overall ranking.
The Czech carmaker regularly ranks top in this competition: it has won the category for the largest companies with over 5,000 employees five times in the last ten years. This year, ŠKODA AUTO landed second place in this category and took the prestigious ‘Employer of the Decade’ title. The ‘Employer of the Decade‘ award recognises previous years’ achievements and thus reflects the consistently high level of employee welfare.
ŠKODA AUTO considers its employees’ health to be one of its core values and has therefore long been active in promoting wellness and healthy lifestyles. In addition, the carmaker invests heavily in education – in all stages of the education system, from kindergartens and primary schools through secondary schools and vocational training colleges to universities, as well as in developing employees’ competencies. ŠKODA AUTO operates its own university and prepares specialists for the dynamically developing areas of modern technologies, industry 4.0 and international trade.
The ambitious plans the carmaker has drawn up as part of its NEXT LEVEL – ŠKODA STRATEGY 2030 strategy also open up new opportunities for employees. One of the company’s development goals is to transform the Czech Republic into an electromobility development hub in collaboration with the Volkswagen Group and local authorities to secure jobs over the long term.
