Employees

We are shaping our business success of tomorrow by continuing to strengthen and empower our employees amid a state-of-the-art environment founded on trust.

TÜV SÜD is a responsible and - for this very reason - attractive employer. More than 26,000 people work for our company worldwide, almost half of them outside Germany. They all make a decisive contribution to TÜV SÜD's successful business development. Their motivation and skills are the basis for sustainable corporate development. We aim to expand our workforce by up to 2.5% annually in the coming years. We attach great importance to involving our employees on an equal footing, promoting their professional and personal development and supporting them in maintaining their physical and mental health.

REmuneration

The framework is set by our global remuneration policy and our principles for fair and gender-neutral remuneration. These reflect the foundation of our remuneration philosophy, according to which all salary decisions should be made objectively and independently of gender, origin, nationality or other subjective factors, taking into account local differences.

Global compliance with minimum wages is a matter of course for us and is underlined and ensured by collective agreements as well as our globally applicable remuneration guidelines for the non-tariff area. Due to their training and job profile as well as our high demands on the qualifications of our employees, the majority of our workforce receives remuneration significantly above the respective applicable minimum wage regulations.

An important indicator for the objective equal treatment of all employees is the comparison of the remuneration of men and women (unadjusted gender pay gap). The introduction of our global remuneration guideline as well as our principles for equal and gender-independent remuneration are now showing the first successes here: for example, the pay gap has noticeably narrowed in 2021 and 2022. In Germany and for the most part also internationally, the salary differences are below the respective local salary difference.

lIFELONG LEARNING – required and encouraged

In a dynamic environment, the tasks we confront as a service provider are constantly evolving. In the face of technological progress, digital transformation, and an increasingly connected and complex global economy, the requirements we make of our employees are changing in equal measure. We aim to empower our employees to master these challenges by providing wide-ranging qualification and continuing training offers. Continuing training is required and encouraged. In 2022 our employees completed around 128,800 days of qualification and continuing training courses, amounting to around 39 hours per capita. In total, we spent almost € 19 million on external training costs.

In addition, a global learning initiative dedicated to optimising learning opportunities was launched in 2022. In this way, we want to ensure that all people working at TÜV SÜD worldwide have equally good development and learning opportunities.

DIVERSITY MANAGEMENT

TÜV SÜD stands for diversity and equal opportunities. The members of our company are from over 100 different countries, are in varying age groups, lead different lifestyles, and contribute an enormous range of skillsets, views, and interests. We are convinced that it is precisely this diversity that plays an important role in TÜV SÜD’s success. 

We signed the Charta der Vielfalt (German Diversity Charter) as early as June 2017 and pledge to uphold its principles of creating a working environment that is free from prejudice. All employees at TÜV SÜD deserve to be appreciated regardless of their gender, nationality, ethnicity, religion or worldview, disability, age, sexual orientation, and identity. In 2022, a number of measures were implemented that contribute to this:

• Compliance training, which is mandatory for all employees worldwide, now includes diversity and inclusion to raise awareness of bias and promote fairness and transparency throughout the organisation.

• Diversity, inclusion and anti-discrimination have been firmly embedded in various leadership development programmes to promote inclusive and respectful leadership and an open and non-judgmental culture.

• Unconscious bias and compartmentalisation are addressed in communication and performance appraisal training for managers to ensure objectivity and fairness in performance appraisals.

• The succession planning process was reviewed with a view to fairness and equal opportunities. A more inclusive senior leadership team will be built globally and across all levels. Throughout the succession planning process, women are particularly encouraged and encouraged to apply for the next step in their careers.

TÜV SÜD opposes all forms of discrimination. We also proactively support diversity and inclusion networks founded within the company on the personal initiative of our employees:

• Founded in 2019, prOUT provides a centre for general LGBTIQ-focused dialogue and activity planning at TÜV SÜD. The equivalent initiative in the USA is the PRISM network.

• The International Women’s Network connects women throughout the company and the world and organizes discussion and debate, coaching, and networking events.

One of the diversity dimensions is gender balance, which is why we want to significantly increase the proportion of women in management positions - from around 26 % today to 30 % in 2026.

We are also continuously working on optimising our diversity management and anchoring the corresponding topics even more broadly in the company. Please find more information about diversity at TÜV SÜD here.

work-life balance

Work-life balance is a core element of our corporate culture and also an important aspect of our corporate social responsibility. We seek to establish optimum conditions for this by providing a wide range of working time models and opportunities for mobile working. In addition, for many years we have offered a constantly growing range of programmes and services to our employees, such as childcare or family care-related issues. 

Since 2009, we have regularly participated in the “berufundfamilie” (career and family) audit to safeguard the high quality of the services we offer. In the fifth round of the audit in 2021, we gained “Gold” status. 

For more about our services for employees, see Careers. We regularly seek new candidates to work with us on shaping a sustainable future. Click here to view our vacancies for sustainability-related positions.

physical and mental health for our workforce

As a responsible employer, we ensure that our employees around the world can work in a safe occupational environment without endangering their health. To achieve this, we focus on all aspects of their responsibilities, from classic desk-based duties to physically challenging activities such as testing wind turbines or cable cars, and work with complex equipment or hazardous materials.

occupational safety

We pursue the Vision Zero approach, striving for a world free from accidents at work and occupational diseases. Our laboratories, processes, and management systems likewise fulfil all requirements and are certified under the relevant occupational health and safety standards. All of our employees receive occupational medical care.

In Germany, a centrally coordinated first aid and emergency management system was set up in 2016 to ensure safety in all procedures along the emergency response chain and efficient management of first-aider appointment and training. In addition, many of our German locations have installed automated external defibrillator (AED) sets.

Finally, in addition to providing occupational mental health services in cases of stress or workplace conflict, we set up a 24-hour emergency mental health service and hotline for employees in 2013.

We further emphasized our commitment by signing the 2017 Singapore Declaration of the International SOS Foundation. Since then, all TÜV SÜD employees traveling on business have been able to rely on a global network of assistance centres providing fast professional help for medical emergencies or security-relevant issues. They operate around the clock and are currently available in around 70 countries and over 90 languages.

Global health & safety policy

Reflecting the internationalization strategy of our company, our corporate health management (CHM) follows an international approach by combining the concepts of statutory healthcare (including occupational health and safety) and voluntary health promotion. We pledge to uphold the principles of the Luxembourg Declaration on Workplace Health Promotion in the European Union, which we signed in 2013.

In 2017 we passed our Global Health & Safety Policy to serve as the basis for our actions and fundamentally revised the policy in 2021. It sets out the organization of our healthcare at global level for all TÜV SÜD companies. It links the concept of legally regulated health protection (including occupational safety) with the concept of voluntarily pursued health promotion. Under central coordination and management, over 30 Regional Health & Safety Managers are in charge of workplace health and safety and implement our healthcare management principles at local level. The policy revision added actions concerning mental health, gave greater consideration to new forms of working, and introduced supplementary performance indicators.

We provide a broad range of measures to raise our employees’ health-consciousness in both professional and personal settings. Specific prevention-based services (e.g. screening for colorectal cancer, stress, and diabetes) improve our employees’ motivation and performance and help to counteract sickness-related absenteeism and the consequences of demographic change. The measures we provide often extend far beyond the requirements of the law.