Company Environmental Protection
Management Approach
GRI
Compared with the impact that climate and environmental protection measures relating to our existing buildings have, changes to our business processes have much less of a potential impact – they are only responsible for just under 3% of our carbon emissions. Nevertheless, we continuously seek out opportunities to increase our level of resource efficiency and reduce our impact on the climate and the environment in our internal processes as well. This is easier to achieve with our own office properties, in particular, which is why we completed our new corporate headquarters in Bochum, which have been awarded a Gold standard certificate by the German Sustainable Building Council (DGNB Gold), in 2018, and the new customer and administration center in Vienna (which has also already been awarded DGNB pre-certification in gold) in 2020. We supply our corporate headquarters with 100% green electricity and intend to extend this concept to other company locations in the medium term – where possible. In addition, digitalization is supporting our efforts to save resources, which is why we are continuing to forge ahead with the digitalization of our processes.
A large part of our in-house work takes place in our own or rented office spaces that are spread throughout Germany as well as in our headquarters in Bochum. Around ten percent of our employees are based here. The other largest individual locations are used by our customer service department and are based in Duisburg and Dresden. A total of roughly 1,000 employees work at these two locations, attending to the needs of our customers. Due to the decentralized organizational structure and the internationalization of our business activities, the number of business trips is also on the increase. However, we are committed to employees using modes of mobility that conserve resources and are environmentally friendly as far as possible. We are thus constantly optimizing our processes in the field of transport and logistics and looking for alternative solutions.
In addition, a lot of the work we perform for our customers is done on site – for example, renovating apartments, maintaining green spaces and providing direct support to our customers. This calls for a high degree of mobility and availability, which is particularly important in the technical service, because its availability and reaction times have a direct impact on our customers’ satisfaction levels. Our logistics system focuses on avoiding downtimes in the maintenance of apartments. The technical service therefore provides a vehicle for virtually each technician.
Vonovia’s fleet consists of a total of around 5,200 vehicles. Due to the high level of fuel consumption, the fleet is responsible for the majority of carbon emissions caused by our internal business processes. This is why optimizing our vehicle fleet is our top priority when it comes to making an operational contribution to environmental and climate protection. By modernizing the fleet of vehicles and attempting to reduce the number of kilometers driven, we therefore aim to ensure that the increase in fuel consumption and carbon emissions is lower in proportion to the growth in the technical service.
Establishment in the Organization 103-2
The facility management department is responsible for building management. This primarily concerns the corporate headquarters in Bochum where around 1,000 people are based, but also includes activities across the Group, such as the energy audit. In addition, the managers of individual Vonovia companies are responsible for the decentralized locations.
Vonovia’s central procurement department is responsible for fleet management throughout the company. As the vehicles in the fleet are primarily minivans used by our technicians and gardeners, the technical service and residential environment companies are included in the management of the fleet – particularly when it comes to user behavior.
The central procurement department also records business travel in partnership with HR management.