Employees & Safety

To us, a sustainable HR policy, where people are front and center, is a prerequisite and a significant factor of our business success. We promote the long-term and sustainable development of our employees by equipping them with the necessary know-how and competences for the future. In order for us to attract and retain highly qualified personnel, we are positioning ourselves as an attractive employer that respects people, affords them a safe work environment, and promotes their health.

Our ports are active and alive around the clock, on 365 days a year. During the reporting period, some 682 employees were once again able to achieve this extraordinary performance for our customers. We make it our task to provide an environment in a constantly changing world that promotes motivation, inner drive, and self-responsibility. Especially during the past two years, a lot has happened in this regard.

Development of Competencies and Further Education

To us, qualification is the key for the interdisciplinary abilities of our crew and therefore crucial to the competitiveness of NPorts. The specialized qualification promotes the development in the individual areas of work, such as Engineering & Technical, Port Office, etc. The interdisciplinary offerings cover a great variety of competencies for a successful cooperation.

To us, qualification has a twofold meaning: (1) Maintaining and further development of the required basic qualifications of all employees for the fulfillment of their daily tasks; (2) Recognition and strengthening of female and male employees with a great potential within the company, whom we would like to further develop.

Since the fall of 2018, we have had a comprehensive database for training and continuing education that is accessible to any of our coworkers via our social intranet, free of charge. All told, towards the end of 2021, you could find 207 offers in the database (92 interdisciplinary, and 115 specialized). If the suitable training cannot be found, our employee are encouraged to make suggestions.

The demand-driven determination of the right continued education is a fixed component of the performance review we conduct every two years. At that time, the further education requirements are determined. Eight to twelve weeks after the further continuation is completed, it is evaluated jointly by managers and employees. If warranted, additional measures will be identified to ensure that the desired quality can be achieved or maintained.

Currently, we are in the process of developing a qualification management tool. To accomplish this, we first defined the setpoint (target) qualifications for each function and harmonized corporate-wide. A systematic alignment with the individual actual qualification should then compute the commensurate need for additional training for each person. In 2022, capturing the setpoint qualifications was completed and transitioned into the chosen software. During the next step, in a largely homogeneous process, the actual qualifications were collected, uploaded into the software, and we established a reporting system. In the future, we are also planning on capturing the interdisciplinary qualifications.

The promotion of further education of all employees is a corporate goal. We evaluate the average number of hours for further and continued education as a control parameter on an ongoing basis. For 2020, this value was 20.8 hours in training and further education. In 2021, it was 11.21. Due to Covid, we registered a significant decline in further education hours. Especially in the commercial area, virtual continued education is not expedient and had to be postponed due to the prohibition of contact.

In addition, we have determined in our corporate goals two days of further development of interdisciplinary competencies per year as a target for our managerial staff.

We capture our work-related accidents in a comprehensive statistic by category (See appendix). We take any work-related accident seriously, explore its root cause, and conduct - where necessary and depending on the occurrence - work place inspections and training, and deduce commensurate safety measures. It is our goal to maintain an above-average occupational safety record compared to the rest of our industry.

The injury rate equals the number of reportable work-related accidents for each 1,000 full-time employees. The number of reportable work-related accidents (for each 1,000 full-time employees) is 41.11 for 2021, and it has increased when compared to 2019 (38.0). There are many reasons for this and they cannot be related to special events or hazards. The 24 appointed stat officials are not part of the calculation, since they are employed by the state. In this context, we have no reportable work-related accident that was registered.

Preventative occupational medicine was unified by corporate-wide applicable regulations. Our preventative medicine cadaster determines the compulsory and volun- tary preventative examinations by occupational groups. HR files the performed preventative exams in the personal management system.

We commissioned an external occupational health physician service that, in addition to preventative occupational exams, also offers consultation and support services for our employees, The assessments made by the occupational health physicians find their way into the risk assessments and, in case of health-related impairments, into the work place design for the employees. In addition, we have a number of first aid responders available that goes above and beyond the required minimum. We train them in the required intervals.
 

Occupational Health Management (OHM)

Healthy employees are the backbone of our business success. The corporate-wide Occupational Health Management (OHM) helps us to stay on a path to success and supplements the measures of the Occupational Safety and of the operational integration. It is our goal to promote health, satisfaction, and cooperation, and also, to maintain our employees’ performance level in the long run. For this, we have various offers for our employees. During the reporting period, we have put
a special emphasis on the topic “Healthy Leadership”, which we promote through compulsory training sessions. We are executing the OHM as a partner project with the JadeWeserPort companies, which significantly increases the efficiency of the offered measures.

There are six employees from all sites represented at the "Arbeitskreis Gesundheit" (Work Group 'Health'), plus the Workers Council, the JadeWeserPort companies, and the partnering health insurance company that function as contacts. In addition, they recommend and conceptualize offers for good healthy behavior. They report on a quarterly basis to the directors and to the corporate executives about the current state of affairs.

n the BGM, we announce a guiding theme. The guiding them is determined based on the suggestion from the AK Gesundheit together with management. In 2020 and 2021k, we have looked deeper into the lead topic “Stress”, with various online presentations, for instance for the topic of self-management and time management, and also with a compulsory event for management staff on the topic of ‘Healthy Leadership”. The lead topic for 2021 was “Ergonomics at the Work Place” and it focuses on the commercial employees we had identified, and within this context, we started some training measures, which, due to Covid-19, prolonged until 2022. Due to the pandemic, we have published online offers for various topics, such as “Healthy Nutritional Eating at Work”, “Healthy Sleep”, etc. During Covid-19 times, we supplemented our corporate fitness offer with additional online opportunities.

The occupational integration management (BEM) and the associated labor agreement support employees with health impairments. It specifically aims to facilitate their professional integration after longer absences due to health issues (> 42 days). In this context it is our goal to discover operational causes for an illness and to devise strategies for the avoidance of such causes.

As a responsible employer, we want to design our employment relations in a fair and attractive manner. No matter, if someone is a full-time or a part-time employee: That does not make a difference to us. Beyond the statutory old age insurance (~social security), there is a scheme under the collective labor agreement for a corporate, mostly employer-paid old age ‘pension’, analogous to the one that public servants receive.

The Works Constitution Act sets the prerequisites for the implementation of significant operational changes. The implementation is only compliant with the law, when the participation rights of the Employees’ Representation are met. These can relate to a right of co-determination, or to negotiations about the reconciliation of interests in case of an operational transition (such as the sale of the crane operation).

Reconcilability of Job and Family (Work/Life Balance)

A family and phase-of-life-conscious HR policy is pivotal for the motivation, satisfaction, performance, and health of employees. Here at NPorts, we are pride ourselves of a corporate culture that emphasizes partnership, gives enough leeway for self-initiative, self-reliance, and trust, and that supports the reconcilability of job and family demands.

During the reporting period, we continuously strive to optimize work conditions and we have expanded our recent measures for the reconcilability of job and family. Examples for this are the provisioning of home office work places, and personal points of contact at each or our sites, that our employees can turn to.

Due to Covid-19, expanding the home office possibilities was a necessary measure for protection. This measure was crucial in propelling the acceptance and the involvement with teams working in a hybrid setting forward. Since 2021, we have expanded our home office regulation to all employees. Now, this offer can be taken advantage of, regardless of the individual need for assistance or care situation. Provided, however, that the workplace at home meets the requirements for occupational safety. Aside from that, and after consulting with their supervisor, employees may work one day a month from home. We have been systematically tracking the work at the home office for documentation purposes since 2021. In 2021, firm agreements were made in 32 cases. In addition, and independent from Covid-19-related home office rules, in 96 cases work was performed in the home office setting during the second half of 2021.

Beyond that, we have been offering a ‘mini time out’ since 2021 within the scope of a part-time model. The total amount is maximum of four months. This means that initially, one works a full work schedule for two months at half the salary. The same number of months is then taken as comp time and is also paid as half the salary. This time can be combined with vacation time. In addition, we have been offering to buy up to five days of vacation per year since 2021.

We have been certified as a family-friendly employer since 2017, and we were re-certified in 2020 for an additional three year. Since then, we have implemented a plethora of measures within the context of the prescribed target agreements. in 2018, we developed the Job and Family Portal in our social intranet, which offers extensive information about parental leave, parental benefits, care for relatives, home office, working hours options, or even site-dependent child care offers. There are NPorts-specific data sheets and links towards further information pages that round off the offer. It is important to us that the employees are well-informed at any stage of their life and work situation, and that they feel supported. During the re-certification phase, we concentrated on the expansion of the home office rules, the mini time out, the additional vacation, and on the development of possibilities to better address agreement needs, also within the context of fixed working hours and shift work.

All employees at NPorts are eligible for parental leave, regardless of whether they are working full time or part time. In 2019, we developed a guideline for re-onboarding after a parental leave. It supports managers and HR departments in their quest to prepare for professional leave times as well as possible, to keep in touch with the parent, and to help make the re-entry as ideal as possible. In doing so, we are focusing on the individual needs of the parents and we try to reconcile them as well as possible with the professional requirements.

More and more, parental leave is also used by male employees: A welcome development that we love to support. During the reporting period, a total of 40 persons took advantage of parental leave, of which 22 were male.

The rate of return to employment is currently at 100%. It needs to be noted that this calculation cannot consider employees, whose parental leave extends beyond the end of 2022. Of the 16 employees that took advantage of parental leave in 2020, 10 have already returned after the time was up; five were women, and five were men. And again, in 2021, 18 persons came back from parental leave, 14 of which were men, and four were women.

Equality and Equal Treatment

Here at NPorts, we pursue the goal of equality between women and men. We are voluntarily guided by the Niedersachsen Equality Act. In this context, we have assigned an Equality Commissioner, and she gets involved in all HR matters. The Equality Commissioner’s task and a summary of the results of the measures are published internally in an annual report. Aside from her blog and the annual women’s meetings, we have introduced a complaints body pursuant to the General Equal Treatment Act (AGG), and an anonymous, legally compliant whistleblower system that can also be used to report discrimination and sexual harassment (See chapter “Strong Region”).

ccording to our self-conception, the working conditions of women and men should make the reconcilability of job and family possible and should realize the professional equality. The promotion and adherence of these goals are followed by our equality commissioner. Voluntarily, and driven by our self-conception, we have determined target quotas and measures for the promotion of equality in the Equality Plan for the years 2019 through 2021. By the end of 2021, the women's quota should be increased from 17% to 20%. The goal for management level was set at 15% from previously 12%. We are proud to say that we have reached these set goals. In 2021, the share of women of the overall number of employees increased from 19.2% (2020) to 20.0%. We were able to increase the women’s quota in managerial positions from 14.5% (2020) to 15.2%. Thereby, we reached our set objective.

Another Aspect of equal treatment can be found in the principle “The Same Pay for the Same Work”. Here by us, the Collective Labor Agreement for Public Servants of the States (TV-L) regulates the remuneration of 96.5% (2021) and 96.4 % (2020) of all employees. Due to the historically based different interpretation of the tariff stipulations of the labor agreement for the pay scale grouping in the individual branch offices, we are working on establishing a transcending pay scale grouping transparency across all locations. For four areas, we were already able to agree upon grouping matrices: (1) technical jobs, (2) nautical jobs and Port Office, (3) tasks in the area of real estate, and (4) management positions.

In addition, we subscribe to the equal treatment of people, regardless of ethnic background, religion or fundamental beliefs, disability, age, or sexual identity. We back this up through our zero-tolerance policy towards any kind of discrimination and bullying. We instituted a neutral complaints body pursuant to the AGG, whose purpose is to investigate discrimination.

8,5 %  Schwerbehindertenquote

We welcome employees that come to us with health limitation or that suffer from health-related limitations during the course of their career. When it comes to selection decisions, merely expertise and personal qualifications count. By the end of 2021, we were employing 56 severely disabled persons. With a total of 13 women and 43 men, the quota of severely disabled employees was at 8.5% in 2021.

We have summarized and put in words our corporate culture in our “Agreement of Cooperation and Leadership”. And in this respect, our management carries a special responsibility. During annual workshops for management staff, we focus on topics centering around culture, responsibility, and leadership. In order to prepare managers even better for their tasks, we are currently putting out a project for public procurement to (further) develop leadership staff (see chapter “Development of Competencies and Further Education”).

To us, as a decentralized company with six locations, controlled information and communications flows between different levels and locations are of the essence. As a complement to everyday communication and the work of committees, our social intranet, and the further developed NPorts App that was introduced in 2020, are two crucial pillars of the internal dialog. In addition, we conduct regular employee surveys, the last one was in early 2020. The participation rate was 56%. The result was an overall satisfaction index of 4.33 out of 6. Employees were particularly satisfied with their working hours and with their expectation regarding self-reliance, own responsibilities, and expert knowledge.

alks with the employees represent a special form of dialog. Within the scope of such employee talks, employees may voluntarily request every two years to receive feedback on their performance & objectives, their behavior, and on their career perspectives. On this occasion, they can also express any wishes and concerns they may have. Also at such time, new objectives as well as further education and compatibility needs are determined. We conduct such talks with our management staff on an annual basis. Beyond that, we involve employees in formal occupational health committees, in the health work group AK Gesundheit, the work group Corporate Culture (see appendix), and in work groups for digitization.

During the entire reporting period (2020/2021), 139 talks with management staff were conducted. The number of employee talks amounted to 318 for 2020 through 2021, compared to 438 in the previous period. It was largely impossible to conduct these talks in person due to the Covid-related prohibition of contact.

The below table will give you an overview of the talks held with personnel that are management staff themselves (annual talks) and with Employees that are not manage- ment staff themselves (talks every two years).