Going that extra mile every day

Running a shared services center under Corona conditions - how does that work?

Corona is indeed a true challenge that requires a sensitive balance every day. We are of ensuring business continuity – invoices need to get paid, people need to get hired. At the same time, we are minimizing the health risk for our staff in Berlin as a critical hotspot. And not to forget, we are continuing with the transition of KWS subsidiaries to GLOBE, and despite Corona we have already added Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, the Ukraine and most recently Serbia and Romania.

What helps enormously is of course our IT set-up. With GLOBE and the work of Global IT we have many tools and systems that ensure we can deliver our services remotely. But the true basis for the continued provision of services is the staff of KWS Berlin. Without the contribution and the adaptability of our employees as well as the extra mile that colleagues go every day, we would not be able to maintain our service.

What are the key challenges at the moment?

We are consistently balancing service execution, service improvements, communication and transition topics. Despite all efforts to handle these different tasks at a high standard, we of course still see a lot of issues in the areas of service quality and standardization as well as customer orientation. We are working hard to bring down our reaction time for tickets, improve the quality and reliability of our services from invoice payments to contract creation, and we are working on improved communication with the rest of KWS.

How challenging is it to integrate 300+ Berliners and New-Berliners into an agricultural company?

This is of course a challenge for KWS that we are all facing together. A little over 2 years ago we started to build up KWS Berlin with a few long-time KWS employees that were accepting the challenge to move to Berlin. We are growing fast and need to integrate people from all over the world. We are hiring experienced tax and finance experts, HR professionals, lawyers and many more. They come with excellent international track records but often with little or no agricultural background. GLOBE will only be successful when we manage to integrate them into our long-established company with its values, proud history and culture. Therefore, we make great efforts to familiarize our employees with the KWS business. In this integration process, formal learning – for example through the new KWS Farming Academy – is just as important as creating personal experiences and relationships. Before Corona we regularly visited Einbeck for two full days with a group of “KWS newbies” from Berlin – unfortunately this format is suspended for the time being, we hope to be able to reestablish the Onboarding visit hopefully next year.

Integrating new colleagues, whether in Berlin, Einbeck or elsewhere, is an area where we need constant cooperation with our colleagues in the Business Units and R&D. Together with our colleagues from the BU Sugarbeet we this year ran our first “Berlin Sugarbeet Challenge”. People planted sugarbeet in their gardens, backyards and on their balconies in Berlin. From seeding to harvesting it helped everyone to really understand our oldest product. Activities like this show, how motivated our colleagues actually are to understand KWS. It is of course difficult to manage such onboarding initiatives under the current challenges – but all our colleagues here are trying their best and I appreciate a lot how people are putting their heart into the development of our joint organization. |