Introduction
The focus of Bouwinvest’s Human Resources Management (HRM) policy is to ensure the company has the optimum number of staff, consisting of highly-educated, engaged and enthusiastic professionals who work together to realise our business goals and create value for our stakeholders. We see highly enthusiastic people as the key to our success. Bouwinvest can only continue to book sustained progress while remaining firmly in control thanks to their commitment, dedication and hard work.
Long-term strong performance
Bouwinvest has 146 employees (136.6 FTEs) and € 8.5 billion in assets under management. This means we need a flexible organisation to achieve our goals of solid returns and controlled growth. An organisation that can respond effectively to the rapid changes in the real estate world and the laws and regulations we need to deal with. For that, we need expert and engaged employees, we need to recruit people who fit within our organisation, with the right skills and expertise, and we need to retain those people by offering opportunities for personal and professional growth.
We have strategic personal planning and succession planning in place, as part of our business planning cycle. The input for this plan comes from the REIM business plan, the fund plans and investment plans, department plans and the plans of individual employees. Bouwinvest has a development programme for team leaders and high potentials. We conduct a bi-annual employee engagement survey, which gives our employees the opportunity to say whether we are on the right track, but also to identify potential improvements. This is one of the ways we keep pace with rapid developments and constantly make our organisation even more effective.
Building value
Bouwinvest sets great store in being a good employer. To compare our performance in the market, we use a national benchmark (financial companies with fewer than 1,000 employees). We emerged as third in the Netherlands according to this benchmark. As an employer, Bouwinvest has a clear policy for employment terms, HRM systems, recruitment and equal opportunities and rewards. We endorse the Dutch Central Bank’s prudent remuneration policy.
Bouwinvest believes in a healthy work-life balance and offers individually customised working hours, part-time contracts, IT tools to support work anytime anywhere and generous paid leave. In the office itself, we offer customised flexible workspaces, health programmes and sports programmes. We use all of these programmes to support the sustainable employability of our employees. Bouwinvest encourages employees to participate in activities not directly related to their day-to-day work and our young professionals can join Young Bouwinvest to develop new skills and expand their networks.
Sustainable partnerships
Bouwinvest’s results are partly thanks to the collective efforts of all our employees, working together towards our shared goals. We see collaboration across the organisation as essential. Enhancing collaboration was therefore one of our main corporate targets last year and to achieve this we defined and implemented a number of specific improvements for every department.
Innovation was another collective target in 2016. Bouwinvest set up an Innovation Lab last year, to encourage our employees to stay up-to-date with innovations in the real estate world. Technological innovations have an impact on virtually all areas of real estate and how it is used. The Innovation Lab has led to a number of initiatives that we are currently working on and implementing.
Last year, Bouwinvest installed its first elected Works Council. More than 90% of our employees participated in the elections. Other opportunities for employees to help shape our organisation included projects such as the (re)development of business tools or helping to devise a new corporate mobility concept. We find that this kind of engagement with employees increases understanding and buy-in for the choices we make, which in turn facilitates the smooth implementation of organisational changes.