OUR VIEW
There is a business cliché that says people are a firm’s greatest asset. At SAP, the cliché happens to be true. In fact, we believe that our people and the intellectual property they produce are our only assets. Our success depends on the innovative ideas of our employees, which they incorporate into SAP products to provide value to our customers. Software is more than just bytes of code, it is the simple translation of customer understanding into creative solutions, a process that starts and ends with our workforce.
Attracting, training, and retaining the very best and brightest employees and ecosystem of SAP professionals is not only our social responsibility, it is key to our sustainable success. Our growth and market penetration truly depends upon the availability and motivation of all SAP talent–both inside the company and across the ecosystem.
We see that the war for talent is intensifying. In the developed countries of the world, businesses are finding it increasingly tough to recruit and retain skilled and experienced staff. The current economic uncertainty will ease the talent shortages only temporarily, if at all. For many companies, rapid expansion in emerging markets is adding pressure to the challenge of finding skilled workers. Deep-seated demographic shifts, particularly among the aging workforces of Europe and Japan, are creating an urgent need to create entry-level talent pipelines, seek out employees from nontraditional sources, and design robust recruitment and retention processes.
SAP aims to build a diverse workforce. We are a global company–both in terms of our geographically distributed production and the markets we serve. A diverse workforce is more creative and innovative, better understands the local needs of our customers, and is therefore more competitive in diverse markets.
On the other hand, we and the entire IT industry struggle with a lack of gender and racial equality in management due to a general shortage of women and minorities choosing to study IT during their educational careers. SAP needs to make a conscious effort to look for candidates with diverse backgrounds for open positions.
We strive to make SAP an employer of choice. Over the years we have won several awards in multiple locations for being a great place to work. We offer extensive training to help our employees hone their leading-edge skills. We also encourage employees to share their considerable talent and energy throughout their communities.
Unfortunately, current economic conditions have required SAP to reduce the number of employees in all markets and at all levels and functions. At the beginning of 2009, we announced a plan to reduce our global workforce by 3,000 positions–to 48,500–by the end of the year 2009. This is a difficult process. We strongly believe that because we addressed the market-driven need to reduce staff numbers in a timely fashion, we will remain competitive and potentially avoid larger staff reductions.
Our focus on people extends beyond the boundaries of our company and far into our business ecosystem. We rely on ideas and research from our partners and extended ecosystem of consultants and resellers. Our online knowledge community, the SAP community network, includes more than 1.5 million SAP professionals. The community encourages the free exchange of ideas and provides peer-to-peer support and networking.
OUR GOALS
To ensure that we have the talented workforce needed to drive innovation and success, SAP is committed to:
- Achieving the highest levels of employee satisfaction
- Supporting and developing a diverse employee base
- Attracting, training, and retaining the best talent
- Further building SAP skills throughout our partner ecosystem
- Encouraging at least 30 percent of our employees to volunteer or participate in charitable work through SAP
