“Today, 14 percent of Trumpf employees are women. If we had a diversity rate and I counted it, it would be 28 percent.”
Dusseldorf Oliver Maassen has never come into direct contact with discrimination at work. But there was one “shocking” experience that kept me from coming out for years. At that time, the 57-year-old says, as a young man he was responsible for personnel development in a bank, and it was about an employee making the leap to top management.
“A board member then said: ‘But he lives with a man,'” says Maassen in the Handelsblatt podcast Rethink Work. “And then it was said, to put it briefly: ‘Oh yes, then not.'”
That shaped him. For a long time he led a “covert life” and strictly separated private life and work. Today, the head of human resources at the Swabian mechanical engineering company Trumpf is open about the fact that he is married to a man.
At some point, Maassen felt “this sense of responsibility” to do more to promote diversity himself – albeit in doses and, above all, from a broad perspective. After all, for example, the production area of the Trumpf family business, which is managed by Nicola Leibinger-Kammüller in the second generation, is a male-dominated world in which many employees with a migration background also work. That’s why the topic of diversity shouldn’t just be reduced to women or sexual orientation.
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Although Maassen is fundamentally opposed to quotas, he would, if at all, wish for a diversity quota for board members in which other aspects such as internationality, qualifications or age also play a role. “Today, 14 percent of Trumpf employees are women. If we had a diversity rate, and I counted it, it would be 28 percent,” he says, not without humor.
Desire for the term “outing” to disappear
Many companies publicly state that they promote diversity in the workforce and on the executive floor. But: The numerous measures are not bringing the desired progress, according to a survey published in March by the strategy consultants Bain & Company among around 10,000 employees worldwide.
According to this, only around 30 percent state that they feel fully included and respected in their company, regardless of the color of their skin, their sexual orientation, their ethnic origin or their social class or age group.
Maassen also takes a clear position when it comes to the inflationary use of rainbow symbols in business self-portrayal, especially in company LinkedIn profiles. He already wrote a guest commentary on this in the Handelsblatt last year.
He often suspects “cheap marketing gags” behind this, especially when it comes to companies that have not done much for “his” community in the past. “For me, this flag is an expression of a commitment, and over many years I have experienced first-hand how difficult it is to make this commitment public.”
And Maassen has the wish that the term “outing” will disappear in the next five to ten years – because it doesn’t matter whether a person is gay, lesbian, transsexual or otherwise. But: “We’re not there yet. We have to do more.”
More: You can hear the previous episode of Handelsblatt Rethink Work here.