Case Study: RAG Aktiengesellschaft achieves cultural transformation and improved leadership quality with QuestBack

RAG completes a 180-degree transformation with Questback software

RAG Aktiengesellschaft, a German coal-mining group facing a long-term wind-down under the Hard Coal Financing Act, needed a reliable way to measure and reward leadership and communication across a large, shrinking workforce. The company’s challenge was to identify individual examples of good leadership, derive organization-wide strengths and weaknesses, and embed those insights into remuneration and development programs for thousands of employees.

RAG chose Questback’s secure, centrally hosted feedback platform to run annual 180-degree feedback for about 800 managers (≈7,000 feedback items) plus company-wide and ad hoc surveys. Centralized analysis and regular surveys drove a shift from command-and-control to a dialogue-based culture: participation exceeded 90%, leadership and motivation indices improved year-on-year, 79% of employees in 2013 said they were proud to work for RAG (up 7 points from 2009), and roughly 5,000 staff were redeployed through retraining instead of forced redundancies.

RAG Aktiengesellschaft

Dirk Bergmann

Deputy Head of Personnel and Leadership Development