For Equal Opportunities in Career: The Ethical Qualities of Franchise Concepts

The occupational integration of disadvantaged groups represents a major challenge for societies around the world. The business model of franchising with its various franchise concepts makes valuable contributions to sustainably improving the employment situation, especially for women and minorities: Engel & Völkers explains why these groups of people experience particular fairness, especially as franchisees or within franchising companies, and how franchising contributes to the reduction of precarious conditions.

Women in franchising: flexibility ensures equality

The role of women and their professional self-image in modern societies has changed fundamentally over the past 50 years. While the occupational and family position of women was virtually predefined as an unemployed housewife and mother until the early second half of the 20th century, today's modern woman is often no less career-oriented than her male counterpart. Nevertheless, prejudices about lower efficiency, such as high downtime during pregnancy and maternity protection persist, even in times when fathers are often awarded free quota in this context. Relatively few women are therefore still found in management positions and higher hierarchical levels of companies. Also, there are sometimes still gender differences in pay.

Franchise concepts are an attractive way for women to independently build a successful career. Investing in a proven and proven business model reduces the economic risk over traditional start-ups while maintaining a high degree of independence and flexibility. A franchisee is responsible for her franchise operation, so she has her own working hours and family compatibility. A dependency on gender-specific unfair employment contracts and pay is also eliminated, since franchise licenses are issued by the franchisor regardless of gender and the final turnover depends on the entrepreneurial skills of the franchisee. In addition, some support programs exist explicitly for women, which facilitate the investment and pave the way to a successful franchisee.

The mentality and ambition of migrants as franchisees pays off

Discrimination, insufficient language skills or unrecognized foreign qualifications: These and other reasons present migrants with major challenges on the labor market. In particular, non-EU foreigners are often faced with major problems in this regard.

Looking at the background of migration to Germany, the improvement of one's own standard of living compared to the home country is often the driving motive. To achieve this goal, migrants often take great risks and spare no effort to build a new life for themselves and their families. It is precisely these characteristics that make migrants some of the most ambitious franchisees and that the investment or start-up rate is higher than that of non-migrants.

Since franchise concepts are often accessible to new entrants and the cultural experiences of migrants can significantly enrich a company's franchise system, they are often contracted as franchisees. Because of their mentality, migrants are better able to reach certain clientele, have a high adaptability to changing context conditions, and often prove to be more resilient and persistent than non-migrants in economic pressures. Through training courses and seminars offered by the franchisor, migrants also have the opportunity to formally acquire language skills or educational qualifications so that their situation is permanently improved in other life aspects as well.

Franchise initiatives promote inclusion of people with disabilities

Increasingly, there are also examples from the field of franchising, which have made it a point to collaborate with physically or mentally disabled persons. An example is the food franchise CAP. Disabled and non-disabled people work together in 16 markets across Germany. All franchise employees are responsible for their own departments, which are tailored to their motor and cognitive skills. This way, the range of services of an economically efficient franchisee operation is achieved. The CAP initiative is supported by the German workshops for handicapped persons and, in addition to the mere employment for people with disabilities, should help them qualify for further positions in the open labor market.

A fair license agreement between the franchisee and the franchisor is also the basis for long-term successful cooperation at Engel & Völkers. We devote ourselves individually to every concern of our licensing partners and always strive to optimize our real estate franchise, which stands for the highest quality in the marketing of real estate worldwide. If you have any questions about our franchise concept, feel free to call or write us an e-mail. We look forward to you!