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Being able to reconcile one’s job and family is of fundamental importance when it comes to retaining staff within RWE and is essential to the lasting success of our company. Family awareness is a fixture of RWE’s personnel policy. In the year under review, the Group companies RWE Energy, RWE Rhein-Ruhr, RWE Dea, RWE Systems (now RWE Service) and enviaM received the Basic Certificate for Family Friendliness as a result of the “berufundfamilie” (“workandfamily”) audit conducted by the Hertie Foundation. RWE AG and RWE Westfalen-Weser-Ems were certified as early as 2006 and 2007. We expect RWE Power to attain certification shortly.
Our employees have a host of ways to strike a healthy work-life balance, including part-time work schemes, home office work as well as daycare and children‘s holiday camps organized by RWE. Staff on parental leave are kept abreast of developments within and outside the company and employees taking care of relatives can request special unpaid leave. RWE is one of the first DAX companies to reimburse its employees for missed child support payments caused by taking on a foreign assignment for the company and thus losing the legal right to them. Those who return to work after taking parental leave or caring for a relative receive reintegration assistance through the “Back to Business” seminar.
The working world is becoming increasingly complex. Flexible work time models are of great value nowadays: More and more employees wish to tailor their working hours to personal needs. Our flexi-time systems allow them to administer their own work hour accounts: They can amass time credits and redeem them by taking time off when they have small workloads. We supplement this by offering home office arrangements: Whenever work allows, staff members can spend part of their contractually agreed office hours working from home. This makes it easier for them to reconcile demands placed on them by their jobs and families because they do not have to spend time going to and from work, among other things. RWE sets standards in the field of child care as well, for example by referring nannies and places in day care centres.
