Bundesagentur für Arbeit

Health Promotion and Protection: The BA's in-house health management system (BGM) takes a preventive approach that promotes personal responsibility and initiative. Fields of activity include occupational safety, health promotion, and integration management for long-term sick employees.

Other campaigns to promote a healthy lifestyle include:

• Special theme health days
• Screenings and eye tests
• Massage treatment at the workplace
• Stress management trainings
• Initiatives to stop smoking
• A screen saver with exercises for the workplace
  

In 2011, the central health working group is focusing on the themes of absentee management, mental stress at the workplace and psychological disorders.

Diversity Promotion: Current diversity activities include:

• An action program to reach the 8.7 percent target quota for severely disabled employees (current quota 8.5 percent)
• Regular information campaigns to sensitize managers and staff to diversity topics
• Diversity management is integrated in the BA's internal training and in courses
• Meetings with the target groups of our fields of action on a regular basis to foster direct exchange. This is an important way for BA to gain insights for its HR policy. Afterwards BA systematically discusses these insights with senior executives in order to promote and sensitize for the prevailing field of action.
  

Recruitment: Job advertisements aimed at university graduates state explicitly that a "comparable qualification" in the form of many years' vocational experience in the respective area will be regarded as of equal value and can replace the formal qualification. This way, the BA expresses its appreciation of the vocational and life experience of older applicants. The older applicants' equality of opportunity is guaranteed in the framework of internal recruitment as well.

This year the BA has added the "employment quota for older employees" to the list of business goals for its internal HR services. The target quota is for 10 percent of all externally recruited employees to be older than 50 years. In 2009, the employment quota of persons over the age of 50 was 7.75 percent.

BA makes use of the specialist knowledge of older employees who have already retired. For special projects/situations, it is possible to recruit former employees for a limited period. One example is the initiative "Taking the Lead", which we started to strengthen the management capability of team leaders. Older or retired persons are part of the trainer team, in order to pass on their experiences as team leaders to younger team leaders.

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