Total Rewards Manager, Steinbach Industrie
Ximena Pereira· HR Business Partner, Silverline Media
Asked in Job Architecture & Careers ·
Germany: how do you treat Prokura and executive-employee status in a global title scheme?
I run reward for the European arm of a US-owned packaging manufacturer, about 3,800 employees, 1,100 of them in Germany. Head office is rolling out global titles tied to levels: Manager, Senior Manager, Director and so on.
The difficulty is that some German designations are not really titles in the head-office sense. Holding Prokura is a registered authority to sign for the company, and whether someone is treated as a 'leitender Angestellter' affects their position under works constitution rules. Head office wants 'Director' to map automatically to both, which our local counsel has told us it cannot.
How have others kept these separate from the level without ending up with a German exception to everything?
6 helpful · 2 insightful · 1 agree · 3 replies · 294 views · 4 following
Accepted answer· by Nina Jimenez
Same sector, same problem, about 900 people in Germany. What we did, with our employment lawyers involved throughout: the global level and title apply in Germany unchanged, and the framework document has a short country annex stating that no level confers signing authority or a particular status under works constitution law, and that those are decided case by case. We also agreed the annex with the works council before launch, which mattered more than the wording. Of our 31 people at director level, only 12 hold Prokura. Nobody finds that odd now, because the two were never linked on paper.
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