CIICPD 2023

Škoda Diversity Report from 2021 (Škoda Supplements, 2022), the company had around 2,000 direct superiors out of which 767 are members of the company management. These include 7 Members of the Board responsible for each area, managers in senior management (OMK), managers in lower management (MK), more than 700 foremen and forewomen, and the remaining direct superiors are either in career development into management, or in positions graded outside of management. The employee structure of ŠA might seem diverse as there are more than 50 different nationalities working there. However, a total of 31,446 employees are Czech, 2,198 are Slovak (together they make of over 95% of all employees), 3,208 Polish, 613 Ukrainian, and 190 German. The remaining nationalities are represented only by small numbers. Considering that ŠA delivers cars and services to more than 100 markets around the world, its workforce is rather homogenous. The official languages used within the company are Czech, English and German. ŠA has its own development department, Škoda Academy, which provides not only language training to thousands of employees but also quality intercultural training for the employees. The academy also invests into educational programmes focused on intercultural communication and diversity management. Also, in terms of gender, ŠA is rather homogeneous. As of December 2021, 79.4% of its employees are men, leaving only 20.6% of the positions for women. In management, women’s representation is even lower reaching only 14.6%. The average age in the entire company is 40.2 years and seniority (loyalty) lasts over 12 years. ŠA has put DEI at the core of its NEXT LEVEL Škoda Strategy 2030 (Škoda Storyboard, 2022b), aspiring for a higher degree of diversity among its employees to better reflect the global labour force. While DEI is a matter for the entire company, the governance of DEI programmes is run by the People & Culture Department with a team of three full-time employees. ŠA as a part of VW Group was impacted by the “Dieselgate” scandal in 2015, after VW was caught having installed illegal ‘defeat devices’ that gave false readings during emissions tests. It became one of the costliest corporate scandals in history. The VW Group was submitted to an external audit – a so-called monitorship (Volkswagen AG, 2022b). As a result, the entire VW Group developed a programme called Together4Integrity to streamline its internal processes. One of the key deliverables of this programme was defining minimum standards for diversity and equal opportunities (Volkswagen AG, 2022a). Based on this, the Volkswagen Group implemented group-wide training of the company management and dedicated a diversity officer to each VW brand responsible for the implementation of the outcomes into the company practice. 1.5 Diversity Wins @ Volkswagen Training In response to social trends, progressive multinational companies invested considerable amounts of money into unconscious bias training sessions “to help employees identify the beliefs and social stereotypes they hold about certain groups of people that are outside their own conscious awareness” (King, 2020) with a goal to optimise company managers’ decisions. However, as King (2020) points out, the majority of these training sessions rather reinforce than reduce biases since they fail to provide managers with

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