Approach to Diversity and Equal Opportunities

Our Approach

There are a number of reasons why Vonovia is committed to respecting diversity and putting it into practice. We provide homes for tenants from every background you can imagine, and employ people from over 70 different countries. We also believe that, in a complex world, diversity gives us a significant advantage over the competition. We signed the Diversity Charter in 2013 to express our conviction. We are also committed to upholding other national and international guidelines, as detailed in our Declaration of Respect for Human Rights (see Compliance and Guidelines). By treating every employee in the Group equally, we create a working environment where people are respected, tolerated and appreciated, regardless of their age, ethnic origin, nationality, gender, sexual identity, physical or mental abilities, religion, worldview, sexual orientation, social background, education or disability. Even though we conclude from this figure that we have already achieved considerable equality of opportunity and that we embrace and promote diversity within the company, we continuously institute further measures in this context and/or adapt existing measures to reflect changes in underlying conditions.

At the top level of management, the diversity concept for the composition of the management and control bodies is set out in detail in the Corporate Governance Declaration.

Organizational Focus

All managers in the company are responsible for implementing and respecting our diversity and equal opportunity standards and complying with the corresponding policies on a daily basis.

Responsibility for gender equality was elevated to the Management Board during the year under review. This highlights the importance of this issue for Vonovia, both strategically and in terms of the company’s ethos. In addition to taking action to increase the number of women in management positions, we also want to provide more networking opportunities for the women in our workforce. We are planning to set up networking groups to this end in the future.

The Vonovia Academy offers courses which are specially designed to provide our female employees with opportunities for professional development, such as “Women in management – what it means to be successful as a woman in leadership”. In 2022, we are also planning to keep our SPI indicator “women in management positions” on a par with the previous year.

We have also revised the training course covering the General Act on Equal Treatment (AGG) in order to raise our employees’ awareness of this issue. All new hires are required to complete this training course. We have also condensed and updated our training material covering discriminatory behavior. This material is closely related to the training course on our Code of Conduct, which all employees are required to complete every two years. All of these training courses are provided digitally so that they can be accessed from anywhere. We are proud that, as in previous years, there was not a single case of discriminatory behavior to report during the year under review.

More information can be found in the Governance and Compliance section.