Developments at Sirius and across Germany

It’s been a busy few months for us at Sirius over the end of summer, and with important developments in German politics I felt that now would be a good time to give an update.

Engagements across Germany

In the past few weeks, Chairman Danny Kitchen, Chief Marketing and Impact Officer Kremena Wissel and I have been criss-crossing Germany to meet with Sirius colleagues at a number of our sites, sharing the results of our staff and customer survey and giving updates on ESG in seven different presentations and visits. After such a long period of disrupted travel and remote working, it’s been fantastic to get out on the road and meet with so many of the Sirius team face to face.

Redoubling our customer focus

At Sirius, our mission has always been a simple but powerful one: to help businesses thrive through providing the right spaces and the right service to enable their success.

With all the shifts in the ways we work both at Sirius and in the economy at large, which I’ve written about in detail in previous blogs, this has had knock-on effects on the ways we service our customers.

As such, we’ve taken the opportunity of our forums with Sirius colleagues to offer clarity about how we’ll ensure our approach to top-level customer service is fit for the post-pandemic age.

We’ll soon be solidifying our policy towards remote and flexible working to add greater permanence and structure to our approach. I’ve written before about how we as a business and our employees can benefit from flexible working practices, so I’m really keen to have this embedded into our working patterns in a thoughtful, considered way.

Going forward, we’ll be ensuring that when colleagues wish to work flexibly or from a remote location, they can do so with appropriate planning and timing – to make sure that they can get the best from periods of flexible work in terms of the types of work that are best suited to being away from the usual workplace, and to maintain our usual excellent levels of customer service no matter where in Germany a customer might be located.

We’re also continually looking at ways of making our working practices more efficient and we’ll be looking to integrate the latest technologies to ensure remote and flexible work is as seamless as possible.

Finally, we’re looking at how our headquarters here in Berlin, where I’m writing this from, can be adapted to best reflect the ways in which we work, and the kinds of work our colleagues do – including changes to the physical space to make it more customer-oriented than a remote headquarters issuing diktats to regional centres, as can sometimes be the case with ‘hub and spoke’ businesses such as ours.

ESG commitments

Something else that’s arisen from our forums has been the interest in our ESG approach from colleagues in all geographies and at all levels of the business. It’s something I and the rest of the leadership team at Sirius have been placing increased focus on in recent months, so it’s really heartening that this is shared across the entire business.

As such, we’re keen to integrate ESG performance into financial remuneration across the business, and shortly we’ll be introducing our first company-wide ESG bonus, based on the performance of the entire business against sustainability targets such as the installation of electric vehicle charging points at our sites.

We know we can have the greatest impact when the whole workforce is aligned around a goal, so this will help focus minds on the initiatives we already have underway, as well as kick-starting progress towards longer-term sustainability goals.

Election outcomes

I would be remiss to pen this blog at the end of September 2021 and not comment on the election results in Germany. I joined Ian King on Sky News to share my thoughts on the day after the polls closed, which I’ve noted down here.

The first thing to note is that this is a decidedly centrist set of results, with both the right-wing Alternative Für Deutschland and left-wing Die Linke failing to secure more than the 5% share of the vote needed to obtain seats in the Bundestag.

This might not seem like remarkable news, but compared with the last election in 2017 when the AfD received the third-largest vote share of any party, and compared with European neighbours which have seen a populist surge in recent years, this is an election result that should bring welcome stability and normality to policy-making.

At the time of writing negotiations to form a coalition are in the balance, but a repeat of the ‘Grand Coalition’ between the SPD and CDU seems unlikely, and some combination of the SPD, Greens and FDP most likely.

The SPD’s focus is likely to be on a wave of new housebuilding to address a perceived shortage across Germany.

Local-level political developments also merit close attention, with a recent referendum in Berlin in favour of expropriating housing from large landlords such as residential investment firms.

What would all this mean for the agenda of a new government? The FDP are liberal and pro-business and would likely act as a force of moderation for any of the coalition partners.

Wishlist for the new government

From our perspective as a landlord to a wide range of businesses across Germany, we’d hope to see any government:

• Reforming planning laws to make building the right type of buildings quicker and easier would be a boon to businesses large and small that increasingly need to be reflexive to changes in customer demand, supply chains and working practices.
• Providing greater clarity on the direction of environmental policy and the ways in which different types of building are assessed for emissions and their ESG credentials.
• Incentivising businesses to invest in sustainability such as providing subsidies for the installation of solar panels.