CARE – Corporate values at AfB
Offering Chances, being Ambitious, acting Respectfully, Empowering others. AfB has used these terms to give a new form to values that have grown and are practiced in the company.
The company values result in the word "care". This aptly describes AfB: We care about the environment. We care about making IT more sustainable. We care about you. We don't care about your disability. We care about the environment. We make IT more sustainable. We believe in our employees, with or without disabilities.
What's behind CARE
Offering chances
We work together to offer opportunities - to employees, partners and customers. We consciously develop our opportunities: we choose, accept and reject. We want to seize our opportunities.
Being ambitious
Our ambition stems from our vision to be the leading non-profit IT company. We are demanding of ourselves, our service, our quality and our customer focus.
Acting Respectfully
We learn to understand the perspective of others and act responsibly in dealing with the company's resources.
Empowering others
A company is only as good as its employees. Everyone should be able to fulfill their role and position to the best of their ability. We experience progress through active and conscious action. We are courageous and committed!
Values in line with the corporate vision
"Our goal is to create 500 jobs for people with disabilities. What are we doing to achieve this? We refurbish and sell hardware. We could do something else, like washing clothes or assembling cars, but we make hardware and want to be the leading non-profit company in the IT industry. How do we achieve our goal? By offering opportunities, being demanding, living respect and acting with commitment," says Nicole Cvilak, Global Manager at AfB.
CARE wants to be lived
The values have been formulated, graphics and posters designed and hung up. Does this mean that the roll-out of the corporate values is complete? Not at all: "Values come from within. You discover them within yourself and use them as a guide. That's why it was important to us not just to publish a piece of paper with them on it, but to make them tangible," says Head of HR and Managing Director Yvonne Cvilak.
For this reason, workshops on the corporate values are held at all locations in Germany. The participants in the seminars engage in self-assessment and external assessment with CARE and identify where they stand.
Christin Nierlich is a coach and has accompanied the development of CARE at AfB. In all workshops at AfB, she has experienced a strong identification with the values and at the same time a great willingness to discuss them. She notes: "Companies often choose formulations such as: Openness, fairness, responsibility, initiative or future orientation. AfB's CARE values are almost instructions for action. They are guidelines that also shape the way we work together in everyday life."
"It was really good to tackle these topics in detail and in a group with all the branch managers present," says Dietmar Mormann, site manager of AfB in Borchen and Paderborn, about the workshop. "Self-assessment and external assessment in relation to values and leadership. Yes, it took us important hours. But it was good. It's good that we have values and that we have now formulated them clearly. The trick now is to ensure that it doesn't just remain a workshop or new documents, but that it is lived by everyone, at all levels, and to do this we, the branch managers, the department heads and above all the management, must exemplify these values."
Our values are important to us
Our values are valuable in our collaboration and support our growth trajectory, our dynamism and our progress. And with these values as a guide, we look to the future to fulfill our mission of creating work for people with and without disabilities with high-quality IT services.