Top Employers Fostering adaptable, innovative policies
It’s no mean feat to make sure your HR practices remain consistent worldwide
Massive multinational entities such as Unilever have a formidable task of staying in touch with their employees and making every individual feel special to promote the highest levels of morale, initiative and contribution to company success.
The Unilever group has to be doing something right, though. Unilever South Africa is the Top Employer 2017 industry leader in both the fastmoving consumer goods and manufacturing industries.
According to Rachelle Harmsey, leadership development direc - tor: Africa, the Top Employers Certification is an important measure of global best practice and the certification is an important validation of the group’s employment experience. It also provides the opportunity to learn and engage with the broader industry on HR trends, and best practice is an important avenue for Unilever to continuously improve its human resources (HR) policies and practices.
In achieving the individual touch, Harmsey says: “One of the macro trends that we see across the world is the move towards mass customisation, where you provide tailored experiences for individuals on a large scale, and we are continuously exploring how we can apply this to our employment experience.
“We believe that our line managers are a key factor in determining our employees’ experiences and as such, we invest significantly in the training and development of our management team.
Every manager at Unilever is trained as a coach and is equipped to provide the right level of support for all of our employees.
“We also leverage from a number of technology platforms to enable us to focus on our employees, such as our internal social network, which allows employees to engage with each other and senior leaders on various topics, and our learning hub, which provides customised learning solutions for each employee.”
Harmsey says the company has a strong LinkedIn presence and is the number one fast-moving consumer goods employer of choice on LinkedIn’s 2016 InDemand rankings, and eighth overall.
“We use our various digital channels to share experiences and stories from our employees,” says Harmsey. “We also have a large presence at university campuses across South Africa and do a number of guest lectures on various subjects every year.
“We run a number of youth employability workshops across South Africa annually that allow students to interact with Unilever employees, and speak and share best practices across various topics at a number of national events throughout the year.”
Unilever’s HR team is structured in such a way that traditional transactional tasks — often the most time-intensive part of the job — are outsourced to an external provider, so that its HR team can focus on engaging with the business and its employees.
Simplification
“We believe it is i mportant to empower our employees to be able to make a direct impact through their skills and expertise. As such, we are continuously in a process of simplification to ensure that we provide an environment where our employees can work with great speed and agility,” says Harmsey. “Our new Connected 4 Growth model is designed especially to increase speed, agility and responsiveness to the external environment, by reducing the layers and processes within our organisations that hinder our speed to market.
“Our employees and leaders are given significant scope for creativity in their role, which encourages creativity and entrepreneurship through a growth mind-set. This is a key method of measuring performance, and employees are equipped with the necessary skills and resources to deliver this in their respective roles.
“We regularly get feedback from our employees on our HR policies through our Global People Survey, which allows us a get a sense of how are employees feel about a number of different issues within the business. Our HR policies are well received but as always, there are areas where we can continue to improve.”
Harmsey says: “Our policies are what enable us to provide a worldclass employment experience consistently across the globe and in turn, to be consistently ranked as an employer of choice globally.
“We believe that the rapid pace of change in the external world means that we need to, on a regular basis, assess whether once-crucial policies remain crucial in the new context or whether they have become restrictive. As such, we are constantly reassessing, simplifying and improving our policies to ensure that they are fit for purpose in the present context.
“With our new Connected 4 Growth organisational model, we believe that we have updated a number of policies that were no longer effective and we have simplified our organisation down to the crucial elements required for delivering innovative products that can help our consumers get more out of life.
“Policies provide the organisation with guidelines on how to create the best working environment for all. In instances where policies are breached, the matter is dealt with on a case-by-case basis to ensure that we take the appropriate action for each situation.
“Multiple factors can affect the implementation of policies, ranging from legal requirements to safety and quality consideration. Policies should provide the right level of clarity, which can then enable speedier actions. Unfortunately, very often many companies have policies that are poorly designed that actually hinder the original intent of the policy, such as a safety policy that is too cumbersome and leads to employees circumventing the policy, which then results in an accident.
“We try and create a culture where our employees can have the freedom to act with speed and deliver on their objective, without placing themselves at legal, safety or quality risk.
“We encourage creativity and initiative through good line management practices, as ultimately our line managers have the biggest impact on our employees’ ability to take initiative and be creative. Often, people choose not to take the initiative, as they are worried about the repercussions of failure. It requires our organisation and line managers to be brave and recognise that doing new things and implementing creative solutions will inevitably carry an element of risk, but for an organisation like ours, the risk of not constantly innovating is far greater.
“Our programmes centre around empowering our line managers to enable their teams to act with freedom and to constantly encourage innovation, even if it fails, so that we can take the learning and insights onto the next innovation.
“If your company is drowning in a sea of HR red-tape, critically assess your organisation’s policy to understand what is crucial and what is no longer relevant. Policies can become outdated and irrelevant very quickly if you don’t constantly review and update them for the current environment.
“When considering encouraging innovation across a multi-generational, multi-cultural workforce, with different attitudes towards authority and particularly HR, HR’s role is to enable the organisation to act with greater speed in landing innovation, and HR is crucial in supporting the development of strong line managers.”