Managers need grounding

Once a year, Heiko Scholz (@LinkedIN profile or website contact), Director of the DB Rail Academy, takes a day off and goes to the heart of our business at Deutsche Bahn: On a "service day" like this, he helps customers at the DB Service Point, cleans a station with a high-pressure cleaner or loads wheelchairs into the ICE together with the @Bahnhofsmission (Aid organization with free contact centers at 105 train stations in Germany).

"With all the hustle and bustle of everyday life, it is important to me not to forget our actual core business - customer service. The direct feedback from the customers - but also from my colleagues in the service department - gives me a lot of ideas that I can feed back into management," says Scholz.

This year, he took his employees from central business development to the Erzgebirge (Ore Mountains), where they learned to dispatch and drive a train by themselves. In this case, it was a steam locomotive from the old days of German railroad history on a separate line. A valuable experience especially for those employees who did not learn the railroad business from scratch - and at the same time a great team event.