Continuous Learning - Why SIX is Increasingly Focusing on the Development of Its Employees

We began revising our employee appraisal process two years ago. Like many other companies, we have found that just talking about goals and progress twice a year is not enough. Even though we as SIX stand for stability and reliability, we must stay flexible and react quickly to changes and adjust priorities. Only in this way can we respond adequately to customer needs. To achieve our strategic goals and drive innovation, we rely on more frequent feedback, more focus on individual development, and building new skills capabilities that will be important in the future. A culture of continuous learning supports us in adapting more quickly to the disruptive changes in our markets and integrating them into our own solutions.

The Performance and Development Cycle (PDC), which was introduced at the beginning of 2021, emphasizes the continuous development of our employees in addition to qualitative feedback on performance. Managers can practice their leadership role as coach and enabler during the year in development and feedback meetings and engage with their employees' learning engagement. It is not so much what we do that we change, but how we do it. Based on our value of ownership, we put more responsibility in the hands of our employees, for example they define their own contribution to the achievement of team or group goals and take active control of their development. They are accompanied and supported by managers. We support these changes in behavior with various toolkits, numerous webinars and interactive labs.

This year, in addition to broadening and expanding the respective professional skills, the focus is primarily on language skills, especially Spanish and English, and the further development of leadership skills. With our digital learning platforms, such as Udemy, we offer the appropriate support. Employees can apply new knowledge directly - for example, in exchange with their new colleagues in Madrid – Spain has been a home market of SIX since the merger with BME. Continuous development is important for each individual, but also a central factor for us as a company. We are investing here to strengthen our innovative power and to shape the changes in the financial markets.