Deutsche Bahn drives business growth and HR development process with Oracle Cloud HCM

Deutsche Bahn is Germany’s national railway and the country’s top supplier of mobility and logistics services. It is a part of the Deutsche Bahn Group, a private joint-stock company which serves additional passenger transport and infrastructure services supported by 330,000 employees in more than 2,000 locations across 130 countries.

Like many companies of its size, Deutsche Bahn had traditional setup for its HR department as a separate, supporting function to the business. To fulfill the business demands of tomorrow, the company recognized the need to speed up performance and succession management processes through standardization and digitalization processes that would better align with its core business.

To realize intended results, Deutsche Bahn began a functional transformation of its HR department as a part of its “Strong Rail” corporate strategy. To support its transformation, the company has started the implementation of Oracle Cloud HCM, and already fully deployed Oracle Performance Management and Oracle Succession Planning to modernize and digitize these HR processes. In partnership with Oracle Consulting, it has also built an innovative feedback application to strengthen the company’s internal feedback culture. As a result, the company has evolved its workplace culture and significantly improved HR process efficiency at scale, while its performance management function is now much more closely aligned with its core business—providing greater agility to meet fluctuating business requirements.

Here’s how Oracle Cloud HCM was impactful in several specific areas:

Linking business goals and employee goals produces a well-oiled machine

Prior to the Oracle Cloud HCM deployment, employee performance management was not tied to strategic corporate objectives. This not only made it harder to achieve the company’s desired business outcomes, but also meant that its employees lacked a clear vision of how their individual performance contributed to overall business success.

By deploying Oracle Performance Management, Deutsche Bahn has been able to map its major strategic goals to staff members’ objectives, supporting performance improvement both at the individual and company level. With shared objectives, an employee’s understanding of their impact has increased thanks to a cloud platform which staff can access at any time and from anywhere.

Furthermore, the application’s flexibility and ease of access means that employee goals and targets can now be rapidly realigned to match shifting business requirements. This offers far more business agility and employee engagement than the previous arrangement where goals and objectives were reviewed only at the end of the year, when they were no longer relevant.

The success of Deutsche Bahn’s new performance management system is underscored by its rapid and widespread adoption. “Within just three months of deployment, 94% of eligible employees had received an overall performance assessment from their manager, and an additional 91% received a work behavior appraisal assessed against Deutsche Bahn’s five principles for cooperation - awesome results”, said Olaf Petersen, Deutsche Bahn’s Head of Manager and Employee Development Policy, Talent Management, and Performance Management.

Because of the COVID-19 lockdowns, these participation rates would not normally have been achieved and were made possible only thanks to Oracle Performance Management’s fully digital processes in the cloud. Furthermore, the rates are particularly impressive given that many operational executives directly manage more than 50 employees.

Driving employee performance and corporate culture through enhanced feedback

To further boost employees’ feedback culture, Deutsche Bahn also wanted to create an instant feedback tool so that employees across all levels could prompt valuable discussions by giving and receiving spontaneous feedback.

Deutsche Bahn partnered with Oracle Consulting to build MyImpuls Feedback, a digitally integrated application serving as a low-threshold alternative to in-person meetings designed to strengthen the open-feedback culture within the organization. The application enables each employee to provide collaborative, “anytime anywhere” feedback to any other Deutsche Bahn staff member, regardless of rank or position. Employees can deliver feedback in various forms, including the nominating and awarding of badges when they see fellow employees performing commendable acts or demonstrating exceptional behaviors. MyImpuls serves personal development needs as only the feedback recipient obtains it.

Previously, annual appraisals were based predominantly on a manager’s impression of an employee’s recent job performance. Now with “Performance Compass”, feedback can be obtained from other employees at different levels, taken into consideration, and discussed openly. This has led to more holistic, honest, and less arbitrary appraisals, which support employee engagement and retention.

The new feedback tools have also shifted the perception and culture of performance as a whole, moving it away from a lengthy once-a-year exercise, and into an integral part of each employee’s everyday activities. Since the application’s launch in January 2021, it has recorded and managed more than 43,000 pieces of feedback, which remain confidential between the feedback giver and the receiver.

Filling management roles 2x faster, and boosting employee mobility

Before Oracle Cloud HCM, Deutsche Bahn did not have a global platform with standardized processes for succession planning, and the search for qualified successors often began once vacancies arose. This resulted in some critical leadership roles remaining unfilled for months at a time, which seriously affected the company’s competitiveness. Additionally, specific and relevant knowledge between former and new job holders was often lost without the crucial handover period.

Additionally, the search for new talent was conducted primarily within the respective business unit rather than across the whole company, which meant that qualified internal candidates could be overlooked. This further lengthened the time to fill existing roles, and hindered staff mobility, a key factor in ensuring depth of employee expertise.

To take advantage of the skills of the entire workforce, Deutsche Bahn implemented Oracle Succession Planning. Managers are now able to find talent across the Deutsche Bahn organization and embrace different functional expertise in internal recruiting. The results are impressive: Time to fill key vacancies has been shortened by more than half, the company has optimized the use of its extensive talent base, and career opportunities are more transparent for all staff members—more than 80% of managers today get candidates they did not know about before, by using Oracle Succession Planning.

“To date, our employees have nominated themselves around 10,000 times for over 1,000 successor functions at a management level and 75% of these have been for another business area. That is a great initial result,” said Tim Winter, Deutsche Bahn’s Head of Succession Planning Project.

All aboard for destination: Success

With Oracle Cloud HCM, Deutsche Bahn has greatly improved its internal recruitment, performance management, operational efficiency, and transparency, while also focusing on increased employee engagement and mobility. HR is empowered to drive positive cultural changes including enhanced, multi-perspective feedback for each employee and offering flexible management of the business throughout the year. Finally, with applications run on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, both employees and leaders have peace of mind for their data security and privacy.

With their new software, HR has also been able to combine and share knowledge and experience from diverse business units, which has helped to support a more positive experience to customers from end to end.

“We had a vision that didn't exist in any standard. What moved us forward to work with Oracle was that we could implement our requirements more flexibly. That was a big reason that inspired us to go in this direction,” said Petersen.

Read more about the Deutsche Bahn story, here.

Learn more about Oracle Cloud HCM

Natively built for the cloud, Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM is a complete solution connecting every human resource process from hire to retire. This provides a consistent experience across devices, enables one source of truth for HR data to improve decision-making, and empowers you with market-leading innovation to address your needs today and into the future.

Learn how you can make that possible at https://www.oracle.com/hcm.

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