Sustaining employee motivation
Employees are the company’s principal ambassadors. It is they who shape the picture the public has of the company, and who represent Rosenbauer in its daily dealings with customers and all other stakeholders. Enhancing employee motivation is thus an ongoing aim that is pursued on several different levels: for example through a modern remuneration system with a profit-sharing scheme, through flat hierarchies and the distributed responsibility that these make possible, or through attractive skill-enhancement and career opportunities.

Rosenbauer bears direct responsibility for 2,432 employees, 54% of whom are based outside Austria. Besides promoting talent, creativity and commitment, the company attaches great importance to rigorous vocational and continuing professional training.

Continuing professional development
A prime focus is on training young employees so as to assure a steady supply of new skilled staff. Rosenbauer provides over 120 apprenticeship training positions at its European facilities, giving it an exceptionally high apprenticeship training rate compared with other industrial firms. Most of those who graduate from a technical/industrial apprenticeship can be offered a permanent job. A large proportion of the office trainees can also be kept on.

Rosenbauer’s extensive further-education and training program permits individualized in-service training for every single employee. It offers everything from courses for personality and team development to foreign languages and management training, and courses with specialist technical and commercial curricula. Rosenbauer works closely with local educational establishments here. Furthermore, the company regularly provides placements for students, and projects for diploma dissertations. 

Volunteer involvement
Involvement in a volunteer fire service is held in very high regard at Rosenbauer. Volunteer firefighters make an important contribution to society by placing themselves at the service of the wider community. In so doing, they also uphold the values for which Rosenbauer itself stands

Promoting health
Rosenbauer is actively promoting a number of measures as part of its in-company preventive healthcare program: one of these is the ‘health pass’, a free preventive medical check-up followed by individual medical consultation. This also includes diagnosis of the support and locomotor system. Another such measure is aimed at helping staff who wish to give up smoking.

Also, the menus on offer at the Leonding site have been designed with a well-balanced diet in mind, and the between-meal snacks sold in the plant have been changed over to healthy products. The sports association, which has been a fixture of company life for decades, offers a wide range of fitness-promoting sports.

The US companies have also climbed aboard the healthy living bandwagon. The focus here is mainly on the increased risk of diabetes caused by being overweight. As well as giving employees tips on how to achieve a healthier and more balanced diet, the US companies have also started a competition aimed at encouraging staff to lose weight.

Ensuring occupational safety
Rosenbauer protects its employees by making continuous improvements to its processes, workplaces and protective gear. The focus here is on accident prevention and occupational health. The company is constantly investing in up-to-date and ergonomically designed tools, work-aids and safety devices. When it comes to the provision of personal protective equipment, it goes beyond what the law requires, for example by providing individually adapted goggles, ear protectors and orthopedic shoes. High priority is also given to collaboration with internal and external safety experts, occupational health physicians, staff representatives and official bodies, and to ensuring compliance with the legal requirements.

Regular, systematic inspection tours and internal 3S (Safety - Set in order - Shine) housekeeping audits are performed in accordance with defined priorities, with all detected issues being improved and remedied at top speed.

A reporting system is used to record accidents and events with reference to standardized criteria. As well as notifiable workplace accidents, “near-miss” accidents are also registered, documented and analyzed in the system, which serves as the basis for improvement actions. The internal performance metric developed to measure this is a ‘lost working hours rate’ (ratio of hours worked to hours lost). Evaluation of recent years’ workplace accidents has shown that most of them were caused by insufficiently safety-conscious behavior and a lack of safety awareness on the part of employees.

The high standard of workplace safety at Rosenbauer, as certified to OHSAS 18001, was confirmed once again in the 2012 renewal audit.