So, obviously, employee engagement can
look very different across organizations,
depending on a number of factors: your industry,
your corporate culture, but also your
leadership team and their key priorities.
I'm very excited this morning to be joined now by
four leaders from three very different companies,
whose organizations have each gone through
their own unique journeys over the past several years.
Firstly, I'd like to welcome Russ Dyer.
He's joining us from Mondelez International,
global snacking powerhouse.
I'm sure you've heard of Cadbury, Oreo.
They've a wide portfolio of brands.
And as the VP of Global Communications,
Russell leads the development and implementation of
communication strategies for more
than 90,000 employees worldwide.
Russ is joined this morning by Joher Akolawala,
Mondelez International Senior VP
and Global Chief Information Officer.
And Joher is responsible for leading
the company's information technology and
solutions and also as
business process excellence organization.
Joining us from Boston,
we have Celine Schillinger at Sanofi Pasteur,
global leader in producing vaccines
and a division of the pharmaceutical giant, Sanofi.
As the head of Quality Innovation and Engagement,
Celine has a wealth of experience
designing and implementing
new leadership and corporate transformation strategies
at a global scale.
And from London, we have Hari Miller from TSB Bank,
a retail and commercial bank, previously,
a part of Lloyds Banking Group,
and now a subsidiary of Sabadell group.
Hari is the Head of
Internal Communications and Committee Engagement for TSB.
And, as such, she's focused on setting
the strategic direction for their internal narrative,
as well as leading communications
for major change programs.
So, I want to start off by
talking about sustained engagement and more
specifically how employee engagement
helps drive the strategy of an organization.
Hari, you've been in a unique position,
where you've actually created a brand new bank
TSB out of Lloyds,
a large traditional bank.
Can you tell us how that happened?
>> So, TSB is a UK bank,
and we were born out of the financial crisis,
which most of us will have experienced something,
some way shape or form,
and we needed to create a bank that was going to
increase competition in the UK banking space,
and ultimately make banking better for everyone.
So it's quite a big ask for us,
and we needed to take our people with us on that journey.
And we started out with
about 4000 people who were
carved out from Lloyds Banking Group,
and we just needed to make sure that
those guys knew why we were on this journey.
They believed in what we needed to achieve.
So engaging our teams
was vitally important in that process.
>> Well, so there you are trying to
define and drive a culture for your new change of bank.
You've got 4000 people.
How did you create that level of
engagement of belief in the mission and the journey?
>> So in TSB,
it was very important that
we establish some key values that would stir us,
as we were developing this and launching this new bank.
Two of the values that we set up
were being collaborative and being transparent.
And whilst they seem very
simple, in the banking industry,
they were values that certainly seemed to kind of
disappear and probably got
us into this mess a little bit.
So in TSB, we need to make sure that we created
that water wheel of communication
in our business so that we're talking on a level.
So it's not we are not cascading
information down to our people.
It's very much a conversation.
So the people own this bank.
They feel empowered to make decisions within this bank,
whether you are working with one of
our branches or whether you are the CEO.
It's equally important that we all believe in what we're
trying to achieve and feel
that you can make a difference.
>> Thank you, Hari. Celine, over to you.
You've used engagement to drive
a very important outcome for Sanofi Pasteur.
Can you tell us why engagement
is so important to your organization?
>> Sanofi Pasteur is the vaccine division of Sanofi.
It is the world's largest company
dedicated to the manufacturing of human vaccines.
And as a world leader,
we are responsible for
manufacturing vaccines that protect
people against more than 20 infectious diseases,
totaling annually to more than 1 billion doses of
vaccines every year that
immunize more than 500 million people worldwide.
So therefore, as a company,
we must rigorously pursue
quality in our manufacturing processes
across the entire company.
And as you know,
vaccine manufacturing is a highly
complex, very regulated activity.
There are controls at each and
every step of the manufacturing process,
which is why we spend actually
more than almost 70 percent
of our time in quality controls.
And every single employee
at the company, wherever they sit,
must be engaged and committed to pursuing quality,
ensuring quality, not just to make
a company successful but because we save lives.
>> So throughout the morning,
we've talked about technology as an enabler
for more transparent and open communications.
Russ, Mondelez, we said it's
a global powerhouse with a wide portfolio of brands.
It can't be easy to connect people across that breadth.
Can you tell us about your role
as the Head of Corporate Communications?
How was some of your technology
enabled you to create connection and
dialogue across Mondelez at scale?
>> So we're a very global company.
It's a key competitive advantage for
us to have such a diverse geographic footprint.
But with that footprint comes some challenges with
increasingly virtual relationships and ways of working,
more remote populations of employees,
remote reporting lines.
What Yammer does is it shrinks our world,
and it enables those human connections on
a level that no other tools provide.
From a communications standpoint,
we spend a lot of time focusing on our people,
the proof points of heroic efforts
in driving our business,
and celebrating our successes and our people agenda.
But there's nothing more powerful than arming
a colleague with a tool
that they can tell their own story.
And there's so much that our colleagues are proud
of that they share in real time locally,
and it open connections in a way
that you can't through
traditional communications channels.
>> That's very powerful.
Joher, you and Russ have worked so
closely together across communications and IT.
Can you tell us how your IT team focuses on
bringing value to the organization
as a strategic partner for teams like Russ's?
How does that collaboration work?
>> So, if you think beyond the use cases,
I think some of the things that we look
for in the organization with the adoption
of technology is what new capability does the technology
bring in that we didn't have the ability to do before.
And with Yammer, one of the things,
which was really good that we use often,
is to have a passionate conversation
with colleagues around the world in
a concentrated period of time where everybody can
exchange their input and their thoughts.
And I don't know if it's official term
or we call it Yamjam internally,
but the idea of having 80,
100, 200 people across 12 time zones,
all collaborating and talking about what
they think of a certain business situation or
a certain priority or even a certain
social conversation that you would want to get into,
the technology now makes it possible to
interact while you have
that many people engaging in the conversation.
And that is something that personally
from a technology owner standpoint I'd really
like to bring to
the organization because that
was a capability we didn't have before.
That's amazing. So you're already living this move
from thinking about communication
to actually enabling real conversation.
And so how you made a great point about introducing
new high-value capabilities that
really didn't exist before.
So, Hari, back to you as the communications owner at TSB,
what new capabilities have you seen technology enable?
>> So these days,
keeping people in TSB abreast of
latest and breaking news is
much easier than it has been ever before.
We used to have to rely on word of mouth and
often a lot of the time we'd send an email
to certain layers of the organization,
and they would then pass the message on and you
type that they managed to get the message.
So now not only do we have extra tools that we can use.
So we can Yammer-notify
people and it pushes up on their phone.
We actually have metrics to tell us
how deep that penetration has been.
So we can assess it then and say,
"Was that a successful way
of delivering that message or was
it not and what do we
need to do next time to make it better?"
So the data is as important to us as
the tool in formulating
what we're going to do in the future.
>> Russ, back to you.
How have people at Mondelez leaned into
the new experiences and
capabilities that you also have made available?
>> We soft-launched in the middle of last year.
And just in the back half of the year saw a number of
really great use cases proving out the value of the tool.
The first is just baseline engagement.
One of our people strategies, as we call it,
is to celebrate our success more and
in an increasingly virtual working environment,
where a lot of employees work with reporting
relationships across lots of different time zones,
remote teams working that are
not connected in the same space.
We saw a real appetite to share and
connect through Yammer quickly after we launched it.
You can look at a function like sales that
has a lot of employees out in the field.
They are not in an office every day.
They're in supermarkets and our trade retail partners,
and they want to connect and share what they're doing.
So it wasn't just, again, a one-way push,
but we found that the sales teams were taking
these amazing photos of
stunning in-store displays that they were doing,
that they were very proud of and sharing back and
it was creating just this great dialogue for
an employee population that's historically been somewhat
siloed and removed from
the corporate communications experience.
So that was just one great population
and use case that we saw emerge.
Another one was something that doesn't
happen every year for a lot of companies,
which is CEO transition and CEO succession.
It was a great tool not only as
an opportunity for our colleagues to say
farewell to our exiting CEO,
share pictures, reflections and
connect directly with her but also welcome the new CEO.
And we look to Yammer to source
real-time live questions and
answers and dialogues for our global town halls.
So again new use cases and opportunities
that we wouldn't have been provided
without a tool like this
in place for these unique experiences.
>> That's fantastic.
Celine, as you were
getting people engaged around quality,
you wanted to unlock
that tacit tribal knowledge in your employees,
and you launched an initiative,
I think you called it corporate
social activism, how did that go?
What kind of uptake did you see?
>> We had high hopes for people
to jump in and our hopes were not disappointed.
When you tap into conversations
that deal with the heart of
our company's mission and purpose,
engagement is really high.
We started with a small Yammer group with 12 people.
That was about three years ago,
and it's now about 2000 people
strong and it keeps growing, which is fantastic.
Every day there are dozens of conversations happening.
So knowledge is flowing
big time and worldwide across layers,
across size, across culture, across languages.
Some of our employees have created activist networks on
big manufacturing sites that
gather hundreds of employees,
and we have seen people speaking up on Yammer and say,
"Hey, there was a problem,
and here's what I did about it or what we did
about it and this is what we got from that."
So we established a new habit that is to share wins.
A win is an action. It's not just an idea.
It's an action made by working
together differently that makes
today better than yesterday
or tomorrow better than today.
>> So one thing about creating engagement,
especially sustained engagement, is that
it leads to much more effective outcomes.
It drives results for the business.
Hari, let's turn to that.
How have the initiatives that you've led
position TSB Bank today?
>> So TSB today is in a great position.
We are continuing to be
a challenger on the banking high-street.
We're doing great work in
the small business banking space,
which is a big area for us in 2018 and beyond.
And our people are in a great place too.
We're working super hard to get those things done.
And obviously that can be really hard on teams,
but because we've got
a great collaborative and transparent approach in TSB,
talking to each other really, really helps.
And there are indicators that showed that that's working.
So our employee engagement results
are really positive still.
And also things like the Sunday Times just recently
put us in the top five for
best companies to work for in the UK,
which is superb and
even better when you realized that we were
the only bank in that space to be awarded that level.
>> And how about you, Celine?
What results have you seen at Sanofi?
And most importantly, perhaps can you measure them?
>> The business benefits are absolutely tremendous,
and they're easy to monitor because we
have so many indicators in quality.
So I'm not even talking about
the cultural benefits but really the hard data.
What do they show us?
They show us that we have
improved our cost-effectiveness a lot.
We have been able to simplify them with volunteers,
good ideas coming from everywhere sometimes
up to 60 percent of
critical manufacturing business processes,
saving a lot of our resources to being
able to dedicate them to
more critical needs of our customers.
A second area of benefit is
the reduction in quality issues in deviations.
And deviations is when things don't go right,
and we have seen a spectacular drop,
double-digit drop in deviations that have
never been seen in the 10 years prior to this project.
Overall, we have reduced the risk profile of
the company, which is tremendous.
We have had a positive impact on supply,
on write-offs et cetera.
But I would say probably the whole or
the bigger picture that I see is one of behavior change.
And that is often
the most difficult thing to
achieve in those business transformation projects,
and I'm really proud and grateful that at Sanofi Pasteur,
we have been able to achieve this at
such a large scale because we manufacture vaccines,
and vaccines save lives.
So it's important to get that right.
>> I couldn't agree with you more, Celine.
Congratulations to you all for
the amazing success you've
driven into your organizations.
And thank you so much for joining us here today.