I treat a published roster, a recognised qualification and a defensible grade as promises a clinic makes to its staff, and I ask the board to fund keeping them before it funds the agencies that replace the people who leave.
I am chief human resources officer of Zirbenau Kliniken, a privately owned rehabilitation group with nine clinics and two geriatric day centres in Tyrol, Salzburg and Upper Bavaria. We employ 3,420 people and reported €318 million revenue in 2025, most of it under contracts with Austrian social-insurance carriers and German pension and health insurers. A founding family holds seventy per cent and a pension-backed investor the remainder. I sit on the three-person management board with the chief executive and the finance director, and I lead 71 colleagues in recruitment, pay, training, payroll and occupational health.
My working life began in the personnel office of a district hospital near Salzburg in 1996. I then spent nine years in human resources at a sterile pharmaceutical manufacturer in Bavarian Swabia, where a contaminated batch could follow from a rushed gowning sequence and a deviation report could close by blaming the operator. That plant taught me that people answer honestly about mistakes only when the answer does not cost them their standing. I carried the lesson into an acute hospital north of Munich and, from 2014, into Zirbenau.
The decisions on this site concern three promises a clinic makes to the people who staff it: that a published roster will hold, that a qualification earned abroad will be treated fairly, and that pay will follow the value of the work rather than the gender of the people who usually do it. Each one cost beds or budget. Works councils in both countries shaped all three, and in two of them they changed my original proposal for the better.
Call-ins from days off fell from 3.8 to 1.1 a quarter
Rosters fixed six weeks ahead, a €60 premium for every cancelled day off and a 58-post float pool cost €2.4m a year. Between 2021 and 2024, nursing sickness absence fell from 9.1% to 7.5% and agency spending from €4.9m to €1.6m.
Thirty-one resident nurses recognised in place of twenty-six recruits
We ended an overseas recruitment contract once we found its candidates carried repayable loans, cleared €77,000 of debt for the fourteen nurses already here, and paid 49 employees with foreign nursing degrees to complete recognition.
A therapist pay gap corrected before the first mandatory report
Job evaluation found therapists paid 8.7% below technicians in the same band. Two grade steps costing €1.8m a year brought the gap to 1.6% by mid-2026, funded partly by freezing management increases for a year.
Current focus
I am preparing our first gender pay-gap report under the Austrian and German laws now transposing the EU pay-transparency directive, and agreeing with both works councils how pay ranges will be shown in our job advertisements for nurses, therapists and kitchen staff.
Conversations I welcome
I would consider one shareholder-side supervisory board seat in a pharmaceutical, medical-device or hospital company in Austria, Germany or Switzerland, offering twenty-four days a year once my chief executive and our supervisory board chair have reviewed the relationships involved.
