/ 14 October 2016

Maintaining the human touch

Rachelle Harmsey
Rachelle Harmsey

A company as substantial as Unilever, a massive multi-national entity, has a formidable task in both staying in touch with its employees and making every individual feel special to promote the highest levels of morale, initiative and contribution to company success.

The Unilever group has got to be doing something right. Unilever South Africa has repeatedly been certified as the leader in its category to work for by the Top Employer Institute and 2016 is no exception. It has also been awarded Top Employers Africa 2017 certification.

According to Rachelle Harmsey, leadership development director: Africa, the Top Employers certification is an important measure of industry 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, and it is an important avenue for Unilever to continuously improve its human resources (HR) policies and practices.

On 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 at 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 of Unilever and as such, we invest significantly in the training and development of our management team. Every manager at Unilever is trained and 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 for 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 (FMCG) 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,” continues Harmsey. “We also have a large presence at university campuses across South Africa and we do a number of guest lectures on various subject matters 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 practice across various subject matters at a number of external events throughout the year.

Simplification

“We believe it is important 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 are given significant scope for creativity in their role, our standards of leadership in terms of the internal measure we use for leadership behaviour, which encourages creativity and entrepreneurship through a growth mind-set. This is a key quantification of how we measure 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 gain a sense of how our 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.

Our policies are what enable us to provide a world-class employment experience consistently across Africa and the globe and in turn, to be consistently ranked as an employer of choice globally,” says Harmsey.

“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 re-assessing, 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 are no longer as 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.

“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 risks.

“Our programmes are centred 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 learnings and insights onto the next innovation.

“HR’s role is to enable the organisation to act with greater speed in landing innovation and it is crucial in supporting the development of strong line managers who are equipped to deal with the challenges of a multi-generational and multi-cultural workforce.”

Complexity, disruption and change

As a South African Top Employer, Unilever is continuously striving to foster an environment where all individuals feel uniquely valued.

It is a known fact that organisations with more women at senior leadership levels tend to outperform those without. In the last few years, Unilever has focused on driving gender inclusion in order to bring diverse perspectives and experiences to a Vuca (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) market. Unilever believes that inclusion is the critical foundation of a sustainable, strong organisational culture where employees can thrive and achieve their goals.

“Unilever’s commitment to diversity and gender equality has proved to be positive for business, with the company being certified a Top Employer in the last few years,” says Unilever South Africa senior vice-president, Peter Cowan. “Our female leaders not only bring the required gender mix to the leadership team, but give us the competitive advantage we require to drive the organisation forward.”

Unilever has significantly increased the progression of women into senior leadership roles, with a target of 52% of its South African leadership team being women by January 2017.

According to Cowan, organisations need to create an environment where women are given the opportunity to lead, be authentic and thrive within the organisation and in their personal spaces. Once that is achieved, the organisation will reap the rewards.

The Unilever gender diversity and inclusion strategy focuses on sustained leadership accountability and awareness building, setting clear targets and measurement and installing programmes to recruit, retain and develop talent. It also has a network of diversity and inclusion champions.


Unilever South Africa does not endorse the version of this article that appeared in the Top Employers supplement to the Mail & Guardian on October 14 2016. We apologise for the error.