Evelyn Palla, head of the railway group, plans a fundamental overhaul of the company’s performance culture. Speaking to “Handelsblatt”, Palla stressed that performance must be rewarded, stating, “It cannot be the same whether someone delivers good results or not.” She made it clear that employees who consistently fail to perform properly should be prepared to lose their positions, conceding that the railway company has allowed this issue to persist for too long.
Moving forward, the criteria for performance will be strictly aligned with customer benefit. To achieve this, Palla introduced a specific mechanism focusing on punctuality-related incidents. Each operational division-including infrastructure, long-distance, regional, and freight transport-will be assigned a maximum allowance for such disruptions. Departments that remain under this limit will receive a financial incentive. Palla justified this shift, explaining that punctuality is a network-wide average too abstract for concrete, daily work and therefore unsuitable as a sole measure of personal goal achievement.
Palla emphasized that this structural restructuring is inextricably linked to the cultural shift. The railway company had already begun streamlining its corporate leadership earlier this year by eliminating an entire management layer. She announced that the next major phase of the reorganization is scheduled for the second half of the year. In terms of economic impact, she stated that the company aims to achieve annual savings of at least 500 million euros. These savings will be a combination of optimizing operational and personnel costs, complemented by efficiency gains derived from refurbishment projects, particularly within the long-distance and freight transport sectors.
