Category: Case Studies

Live the Brand – Coca Cola’s journey on driving people, passion, happiness and performance

This is exciting. The second day’s opening keynote is Stevens J Saint-Rose, Coca Cola’s International SVP of HR at the Human Asset Summit in Budapest. What is Coca Cola International? Basically every country outside United States – yes, folks in the US still look at the world that there is US and there is the rest of us. Oh well..

Anyway, Stevens is a fantastic guy, full of energy and passion who truly lives what Coke is about, fun and happiness. This amazing attitude and professional humility actually carries a huge – I mean huge – amount of knowledge, skill and dedication – hey, you don’t get such a job if you don’t have true competence in the area. I had the pleasure of chatting with him over 2 hrs last night over a (few) glass(es) of wine I was blown away…

Main challenge: what can HR professionals do differently to meet future demands? For a company with over 700,000 employees across practically all over the world it is not an easy thing to do…

While previously a ‘chess-player’ approach of HR served well, in today’s complex business environment it’s a huge challenge. Coke had a ‘simple’ business vision, achieving in 10 years what company had achieved in the previous 125 years, that is doubling revenue in 10 short years.

How to achieve that? Coke started by looking at Organizational Capability Building and of course via succession and talent management.

However it’s not enough to create a talent focused organization, it is also critical to look at and create the right culture. Hence the company has developed a new approach to Employee Engagement, engaged, enabled,energized – a recipe for the big “E”, that is Breakthrough Engagement.

Worth doing? According to Stevens definitely ‘yes’,  as those organizations who practiced Breakthrough Engagement had significantly better financial performance.

What’s next? How to really achieve high level energy when people already feel they give their maximum and fully engaged. According to Stevens and Coke is all about Happiness in the workplace. Hence they visited Bhutan, the only country in the world that uses a measurement of Gross National Happiness. The are 9 areas to happiness in Bhutan

  • Living Standard
  • Good Governance
  • Education
  • Health
  • Environment
  • Psychological well being
  • Cultural diversity and resilience
  • Community vitality
  • Time

Would it work in Coca Cola or even in your own company? Not necessarily you must look at what are the conditions that drive happiness in your own company.

Stevens warns not to confuse Condition with Dictatorship – it’s not about creating rules, it is rather about creating options where people may choose what’s best and meaningful for them.

6 Trends – external factors impacting the workplace

  • New war for talent

We are moving from of capitalism to a world of talentism. (WOF) – There is a huge talent shortage in developed world despite the huge unemployment rate globally.  Employability shortage is a huge challenge, the skills supplied and available on the labour market is outdated and are not needed, hence the right people to fill do the job are still not available. So the new challenge is not about fighting for the limited number of available talent rather fill the pipeline with more talent. This will require also a  fundamental cultural change, giving opportunities for young people and women to move up.

  • Multi-generations at work

Generation Y – or rather, Y Not? – the new generation accustomed to make decision, grown up in a world of involvement, so they demand involvement in the workplace too. Loyalty in their context is different, while generally they  have more passion towards their organization they are more likely to leave too. And with a new Gen Z on the horizon HR professional must look at how to change organizations to adapt to the new generation of workforce. (Read my previous blogpost on the 2020 workplace here)

  • Women in leadership

What is your organization doing to become more flexible to drive women to leadership? Unfortunately most do not do anything… 62% of companies (Mercer research) don’t do gender diversity training. To create the right avenue for women companies must create executive sponsorship, better work life balance, flexible work environment, networking and socialization for women and lastly build confidence in women.

  • Sustainability

Organizations moving from CSR to Sustainability - creating an ecosystem where everyone wins. More and more young adults are asking what’s the company’s strategy on sustainability. It has become a tool to attract young talent. (Nestle and GE does some great stuff on Shared Values)

  • Globalization

Globalization is making the world smaller. Leaders no longer can just think about their country and market. Leaders must act within their market but think about the world. From the HR perspective: what types of leaders are we building? We must create the right competencies and leadership behaviors, leaders that are agile to be globally competent

  • New ways of working

Technology has enabled us to have new ways of working – organizations has been slow to adapt that work is what you DO and not where you GO. Companies must show organizational flexibility for young adults. Time to wake up, work is not 8 hrs manufacture anymore, rather companies must create an environment that values RESULT DELIVERED and OUTPUT over SHOW UP. (Ricardo Semler has revolutionalized workplace democracy since the eighties, it’s good to see that this also infiltrates mega organizations)

This comes with a lot of additional business benefits – more engaged workforce achieving more output, resulting higher performance. On the cost side smaller office spaces required can drive cost considerable down.

Talent clouding is gaining momentum: virtual agency, a database of skilled people who don’t want to work full time and willing to do certain task.

The closing question for HR professionals: Are we thinking differently? It’s never been a better time to be in HR as more and more organization relies on HR to run the business – It’s Capitalism to Talentism – It’s our time!

What’s next for HR?

  • Marketing

HR must be better marketer and use marketing principles of segmentation to offer more individualized services for people. What marketing does to understand consumers, HR must take on the understand employees – as Stevens put it “Employees our most important consumers”

Brand value proposition = Employee value proposition

  • Collaboration

It’s not about internal collaboration, rather collaboration outside of the company. Be more externally focused, leverage relationship – HR has never been in a more prime place to lead such organizational transformation.

What three amazing days are ahead!

Phuuu, it’s been a hectic year, however we are in the finish line for the upcoming Human Asset 2012 Summit. What an amazing three-days event is ahead, I am so excited as this is the best event so far we have produced in terms of content and quality.

I can only thank from the bottom of my heart for all speakers, supporters and most importantly our folks at Stamford Global who contributed towards making it a great event.

You guys simply ROCK!

Now what is waiting for the attendees on 13-15 November ?

We shall be again at a fantastic venue, the 5-star Boscolo Hotel -yup, three days of luxurious pampering and finally a place where during the coffee break they serve TRUE Italian cappuccino, latte, or whatever you like.  Small thing but matters :)

An amazing line up of speakers, including first time in Europe Dr. Marshall Goldsmith, #7 most influential business thinker on Thinkers 50 list and Dr.Dave Ulrich (requires no introduction) – the man who shaped the way we think about HR, the #1 most influential international HR Thinker.

Marshall will also hold an exclusive Masterclass for business leaders in Hungary on 12th November at our partner, Telekom Hungary’s Headquarter.

We shall be kicking off on 13th November with a Marshall masterclass on Leadership Development prior the official opening of the Summit.

Then at 1 pm the official opening will happen, straight away sharing 2 global corporate keynotes. Derrick Ahlfeldt, Senior VP for HR at Visa Europe will highlight how building strategy is aligned with structuring the team and eventually delivering performance.

Then a very forward looking, provocative presentation by Ebay’s senior HR director, head of Global Employee Engagement, Annemie Ress who will guide us through the HR (R)Evolution – the evolving role of HR and business management, how we must start thinking differently about people and the drivers of true performance.

Great start, time for a Cocktail Dinner, a glass of champagne and networking. By the way, we shall have fantastic line up of attendees too.  This is probably the only vendor neutral event in Europe, where participants meet people from the profession, VP, Director level of attendees – close to 200 of them – from Switzerland, Germany, Central Europe, Russia, Nordics regions.

After the Day One BIG IDEA day it’s time to roll up the sleeves and get to work. Day Two is all about PRACTITIONERS. The day will start by a mindblowing – and I mean it! – keynote by Stevens J. Sainte-Rose, Group HR Director, Eurasia Africa Group, The Coca Cola Company. Those who saw Stevens at our Talent Summit earlier this year know what I am talking about.

It’s no nonsense, high energy, high on content session.

Time to select a Track which is the most appealing. The Strategic HR Track will be chaired by Stevens, he will introduce Geoffrey Matthews – Vice President, HR Strategy – Merck Group, who will highlight A New Model for Leaders to Engage Their Organizations

After this speech we shall welcome Jonathan Ferrar, VP of HR, Analytics at IBM, all the way from the Big Apple. IBM has done some fascinating stuff on Analytics that resulted pure gold business result, so this is a presentation not to be missed.

Following Jonathan Jozsef Blasko, former WE HR Director at BAT, a true globetrotter will provoke the audience with The (R)Evolution of HR to a strategic Role

Lastly on this Track we shall welcome a business representative, Sunil Halbe who is the General Manager for Group Finance at Arcelor Mittal. Let’s hear Sunil’s story from a CFO point of view on Strategic Innovation and Diversity: Corporate and Local Collaboration Team realignment, Leadership and Motivation

Parallel with this session runs the Talent & Employee Engagement Track chaired by Paul Turner.

We shall start this Track with a really interesting presentation on Talent management , diversity & inclusion at Starwood by Ingrid Eras, VP People Development and Staffing EAME.

Thereafter attendees may get an insight by Paul Turner about Employee Engagement in Europe – an original research done by the HCM Excellence Network – a learning community we operate on LinkedIn.

After Lunch, Neil Edwards , Head of HR , Nestlé will deliver a fascinating case on The business of growth in FMCG – how small changes make a big impact in driving innovation through people.

Then the German pharma giant, Bayer’s VP for HR and Talent Development, Marcello Yoshida, will highlight Global Talent Management –Changes, Challenges and Complexity and what it means for Bayer.

The 3rd Track will be all about Leadership and Talent Development.

Firstly Eva Somorjai, Hungary’s No 1 telecom operator’s CHRO will highlight what Telekom does in order to identify, engage and retain future leaders in a high performance environment.

This will be followed by a very interesting insight of a Scandinavian case study on  ‘Leadership in Action’: Developing leaders where leadership really takes place! by Henrik Kongsbak, Partner, Resonans and Rikke Agerskov, HR Partner, Novo Nordisk.

Then let’s get provocative: our Track chair, Kieran Hearty will challenge the audience whether Gender balance in leadership positions – does diversity drive business performance?

After the elective tracks we shall close the day with a fascinating, M-Prize winner keynote on Statoil’s  radical departure from traditional management – all driven by a passion to be an agile and human place to work by Bjarte Bogsnes - Vice President Performance Management Development.

… and the summit is still not over, Day 3 is ahead!

We shall kick off Day 3, 15th November by a Dave Ulrich keynote. Those of you who saw Dave last year know what to expect, a high energy, superb content presentation – 1 hour will go by like a moment! His question for this year: What it takes for HR to deliver sustained Value?

Day 3 is all about Action Learning, let’s get our hands dirty and roll up the sleeves during peer-led workshop sessions!

There will be Four really cool workshops run by your peers in parallel with Professor Ulrich’s masterclass sessions. Sorry folks, Dave’s masterclasses are separately bookable – yet all seats are sold out by now…

So the peer led masterclass sessions are:

1. Ingrid Eras will deliver a 3 hrs session on Gen Y Attraction, Engagement and Career Management – fashionable topic, however the folks at Starwood have really nailed to subject!

2. Paul Turner will team up with Danny Kallman, Global Talent Management Director at Panasonic, who will fly in all the way from Japan to teach about Talent – a Formula for Success.

3. Join Annemie Ress again from Ebay to dive into some thought provoking ideas about engagement, intrinsic motivation and the true drives of performance.

4. last but not least Kieran Hearty is here again, the former T&D Director at Emea for Intel will deliver a truly high performance workshop on how to eat the Elephant in the Room – investigating the key drivers of team performance. What elephant? Join Kieran’s session to find out more.

After the afternoon coffee break (great latte again!) come back for a fascinating closing keynote by Cranfield lecturer Trish Thurley on the Challenger story - The Shuttle Case – Working at the Limits of Safety. A thought provoking case study of the importance of Leadership derail and communication.

So yes, we have worked very hard to bring a truly amazing three days together for you, I am sure it will be 3 days well spent. See you all at Human Asset 2012 on 13-15 November in Boscolo Budapest

The end of performance management (as we know it)!

Traditional performance management has run its course. It does not make us the agile and human organizations we need to be. Can we learn from something from traffic?

Bjarte Bogsnes, VP Performance Management Development at Statoil, Chairman Beyond Budgeting Roundtable Europe surely thinks so.
“We have continuously developed our management model “Ambition to Action” with “agile” and “human” as key guiding principles.  For instance, in 2005 we abolished traditional budgeting, and we decided in 2010  to leave the calendar year in our management processes where-ever possible . “Self-regulation” has become an increasingly important word for us on this journey, not as a goal in itself, but as a great way of achieving great performance. We found inspiration in something which one initially might think of as very different from organizations and business, but where we all also want the best possible performance. I have yet to meet anyone enjoying being stuck in traffic or exposed to inefficient and dumb traffic controls.  We would all like a safe and efficient traffic flow.”