Volkswagen’s attempt at improving its corporate culture has yielded no results, the company’s top later representative told Automotive News. According to works council chief Bernd Osterloh, a survey of more than 51,000 employees that was conducted in December 2017 revealed that almost two-thirds of the automaker’s staff admitted to seeing “no improvement” in Volkswagen’s corporate culture despite the automaker admitting to needing one after the fallout from Dieselgate.

Volkswagen’s attempt to become a more transparent company is seen as one of the most important ways for the automaker to regain the trust and confidence its employees used to have. A big part of that transparency was to improve corporate culture and a host of other elements related to it. Unfortunately, little has changed in that regard, according to works council chief Bernd Osterloh.

"Culture change for us remains a permanent work site," Osterloh told Automotive News. Osterloh also said that Volkswagen workers remain critical of management’s internal communication skills, and that’s on top of similar concerns surrounding job safety and retirement conditions.

Volkswagen’s human resource chief, Karlheinz Blessing, added that there needs to be more support for this initiative before everyone starts seeing positive results. “We have been saying all along that a culture change cannot be implemented over the short-term and takes time and is also not the work of an individual or of individual participants,” Blessing said in a separate interview with Automotive News.. “All stakeholders are urged to bring about this culture change.”

Blessing also admitted that the negative news flow that Volkswagen continues to attract is one of the reasons why morale within the company continues to trend south. "With the negative headlines that keep surprising us, it would be remarkable if the sentiment was not affected," he said. "We can only apologize to the staff for what they have to put up with, even though we are not the originator of these headlines."

The way it looks from the outside, it seems that Volkswagen still has a lot of work to do to reinvigorate its workers, especially if two-thirds of 51,000 people admitted that corporate culture hasn’t improved in the wake of the Dieselgate scandal.

Auto News0}

Read more Volkswagen news.