Responsible employer

As a company providing services, it is the Zurich Airport Group's employees who hold the key to its success. The daily efforts of 2105 employees in over 70 different occupations materially influence the quality of services and the long-term success of the company.

Relevance

The company has a major responsibility towards its own staff, and its conduct also has an influence on the working conditions of the employees of its airport partners. It maintains a collaborative and respectful relationship with its workforce. This applies to all employees, irrespective of their background and their position in the company. During the year under review the company focused on returning to normal operations following the exceptional situation caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and on introducing the new corporate values (see Strategy).

Approach

Safeguarding rights and health

The Zurich Airport Group respects the international standards of the ILO (International Labour Organization) and all the labour laws applicable locally at its airports. It offers fair pay, higher than the respective minimum wage, and does not tolerate any child or forced labour, neither in the company itself nor at its suppliers, contractors and airport partners. Measures and precautions relating to human rights are described in a separate section.

Participation rights

In the reporting year, the PeV conducted negotiations for a general pay increase across the board and exercised its right of consultation for the regrading of job functions. Employees can contact the PeV either by telephone, in writing or in person at its new office set up during the previous year. Staff make extensive use of these opportunities for dialogue.

There are no collective bargaining agreements at Zurich Airport or in India and Chile. In Brazil on the other hand, 100% of employees with a local contract of employment are legally entitled to the conditions negotiated annually in collective bargaining agreements.

Employee survey

The revised strategy, purpose and values of the company were launched at the beginning of the reporting year. These were communicated to all staff based in Zurich, and workshops were held to embed them among management. At the Zurich site, for the first time since 2016 a company-wide employee survey was carried out which focused on the revised corporate values. In the anonymous survey, employees gave feedback as to whether they thought the values were being lived out in the company. The survey further measured work satisfaction, engagement and commitment. The response rate of the survey was roughly 66%.

Health management

The Zurich site has a health management policy aimed at promoting and maintaining the health of employees, both at the workplace and in their private lives. On the one hand, this includes occupational safety (see Occupational and aviation safety section), i.e. the prevention of accidents and other negative health impacts resulting from work. On the other hand, Flughafen Zürich AG offers its workforce an extensive range of opportunities to improve their physical and mental health. For instance, the company offers free sport benefits and free vaccinations against flu and – for personnel exposed to them – tick-borne encephalitis (FSME), hepatitis A and B, as well as specific travel vaccines for staff who are sent to work abroad. Flughafen Zürich AG also regularly informs its workforce about certain issues through campaigns – on workplace ergonomics, on preventing accidents, on healthy eating, and much more besides.

If they have any personal issues or work problems, employees at the Zurich site also have the option of contacting an external advice center for free and confidential advice. The center can be contacted 24/7 and is completely confidential – the employer cannot determine who has made use of this service.

At the airports in Brazil, employees must be allowed to participate in a “CIPA” forum (Comissão Interna de Prevenção de Acidentes de Trabalho). As well as promoting good health, such forums seek to prevent workplace accidents and occupational illnesses. Employees choose the members of this body themselves.

Attractive and secure jobs

An airport is a unique working environment involving an enormous variety of jobs. The jobs Flughafen Zürich AG offers are attractive to applicants and cover a broad range of occupations and qualifications. This also applies to the other companies operating at Zurich Airport – a total of over 300 firms employing some 27,000 people between them.

Flughafen Zürich AG continued to be a reliable partner for its employees in 2022. The short-time working which had been in operation at Zurich Airport since March 2020 due to the economic consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic ceased at the end of February 2022. The company made up the difference in pay resulting from the reduced working hours for all employees so none suffered a drop in earnings.

Flughafen Zürich AG attaches importance to fair, market-based remuneration: it pays bonuses above the statutory minimum for working at night and over weekends and holidays. It also awards bonuses for work in especially unpleasant, dirty or noisy environments.

In the reporting year, Flughafen Zürich AG employed 85 non-guaranteed hours employees (see Key data). In Zurich, these are mainly people who work for the VIP Service or at service points and info desks, along with tour guides who have mostly already reached retirement age.

At the airports in Latin America, the company contributes to employee health insurance premiums. While arranging and paying for health insurance policies for workers is mandatory in Brazil, the subsidiary in Chile voluntarily pays 70% of these costs.

The majority-owned airports in Brazil were jointly awarded the Great Place to Work label. This stems from an employee survey already carried out during the previous year, the results of which were also used to identify measures to improve the situation of the workforce. The label is issued annually on the basis of a new survey.

Pay survey

Swiss law requires companies based in Switzerland with over 100 employees to periodically review pay equality, for which the federal government provides a specific pay equality tool (Logib). Flughafen Zürich AG last undertook such an analysis of pay equality in 2021. According to its method of calculation, there was a gender pay gap of 3.5% in favour of men in the reporting year, which is within the Confederation's tolerance threshold of 5%.

Compensation ratio

Pension fund

In Brazil, the subsidiaries match the amount of any additional payments into a private pension plan.

Discounts

All Zurich staff enjoy a range of benefits and discounts at the airport such as discounted prices in most cafés and shops.

As in Zurich, employees in Brazil benefit from discounts in stores at the airports. Certain deals for employees have also been negotiated with schools, shops, pharmacies, etc.

Work-life balance

The option of remote working became even more firmly established at the Zurich site during the reporting year. Wherever feasible and expedient, Flughafen Zürich AG can provide the necessary equipment and organisational structures to facilitate remote working. In the year under review, some individual administrative time accounting processes were modified in order to simplify this mode of working and also pass on more responsibility to employees. Meeting face-to-face in person remains important too, however. Moreover, many airport employees cannot work remotely as their particular job requires their physical presence on site.

In addition, all staff benefit from flexible working time models. These enable them, for instance, to work around family commitments, devote time to important public or political office, have time for further education, or simply pursue social activities. The annual hours working time model provides a basic level of flexibility for most employees. 32% (previous year: 32%) of Zurich-based employees with open-ended contracts worked part-time in the year under review. To encourage more part-time working, the company offers the option of a trial reduction in working hours for twelve months. It also supports unpaid leave, allowing employees to pursue life goals such as world travel, longer courses of study, extended maternity or paternity leave, or for any other reason they wish a leave of absence. After such time spent on personal development, they will return to their jobs with renewed energy and all the more motivated.

The ability to combine work with family life is especially important to Flughafen Zürich AG. In addition to the enhanced flexibility options outlined above, new mothers receive 16 weeks paid maternity leave, two weeks more than the statutory minimum. Fathers are entitled to the statutory 10 days paternity leave.

Education and professional development

A 12-month programme for trainees (with the option of a 12-month extension) is offered at the Florianópolis, Vitória and Macaé airports, with a total of five people being trained during the reporting year.

The company offers a very wide range of training courses in Zurich. Employees and managers can deepen or extend their technical, personal and social competencies in a variety of seminars and training courses. Overall, approximately 450 courses are offered. While a large number of training courses are mandatory for certain groups to enable them to continue practising their professions, there are also a wide variety of other learning and development opportunities for employees and managers. Flughafen Zürich AG furthermore contributes funding and/or time for specific external training courses, on average for some 60 employees each year.

As the operator of several airports around the world, Flughafen Zürich AG furthermore offers suitable personnel the opportunity to take up airport-related posts abroad so they can develop their skills in an international environment.

Workers in an employment-like relationship

Cleaning workers in an employment-like relationship are used to cover peak periods, and are therefore used mostly during the summer months. These workers are employed by an agency, but are treated the same as the company's own employees in relation to working hours and bonuses.

Workers who are not employees are also used in the field of ICT. This makes it possible to buy in the necessary skills and bridge short-term capacity bottlenecks. These workers are often employees of specialist IT companies, for example.

It is very rare for workers not to be direct employees at the international majority-owned subsidiaries in Brazil and Chile, and it is not the case in India at all.

Owing to the bankruptcy of the firm constructing the new terminal in Iquique, some of its employees were taken on temporarily, which explains the jump in the headcount there. Once the construction work has been completed, which is scheduled for this year, the number of employees will fall again.

Key data