Developing & engaging our people

Developing a team fit for growth

Developing and retaining the right quantity, quality and diversity of people is going to be crucial to our growth strategy.

In 2009 we launched our ‘talent and organisation readiness’ programme. This helps ensure our people have the right skill sets to manage the business through a period of growth. We are assessing those areas of the business most crucial to our strategy and whether we have the structure and the talent. Where we identify gaps, we focus on:

• changing organisational structures
• revising our recruitment strategy and approach
• reviewing our retention schemes
• improving core processes such as decision-making
• focusing on culture and employee engagement
• using development and training programmes to build capability levels.

In 2010 we rolled out this programme across our business. By the end of 2010 talent and organisation readiness assessments had been conducted in countries making up around 75% of Unilever’s turnover. These assessments have given us important new insights and are now fully integrated into our core business planning and HR processes.

In China, for example, we identified a shortage of talent in the leadership pipeline, and difficulties in retaining young talent. So we developed a recruitment scheme for students studying overseas, offering opportunities back home once they have finished their initial training at Unilever. In Latin America, our ‘Unilever in your class’ campus programme targeted college students across eight countries. The programme has helped almost 1 700 students learn more about Unilever and the consumer goods industry. We will roll it out to more countries in 2011.

Investing in learning

In 2010 we developed our Learning and Leadership Programmes. Through our Learning Management System (LMS), our core learning programmes are now available in 22 languages to over than 120 000 employees in 109 countries. The system provides nearly 300 instructor-led programmes a month, and offers more than 100 e-learning modules.

All employees with corporate intranet access now have a ‘learning passport’ that enables them to manage their own skills development, while at the same time allowing the company to drive specific training that is strategically or legally required. For example, during 2009 and 2010 we carried out targeted training programmes in China and Russia on sales skills, while in Thailand we focused on leadership development.

In December 2010 we formed the Unilever Learning Academy (ULA), bringing together all our major functional academies (Marketing, Supply Chain, R&D, Finance, HR, IT, Customer Development) with our Leadership Skills and General Skills teams to share best practices and to adopt common processes and standards for learning.

All functions have completed work to identify the skills that define their areas of expertise. These are available for employees to assess themselves against to help them with their career planning and personal development.

Sustainability training

Our sustainability training courses continue to be well attended, with around 400 people registering for sustainability awareness e-learning (twice as many as in 2009). More than 100 employees attended the higher level Sustainability Foundation course, and a further 132 registered for a virtual sustainability course targeted at our employees in the Africa, Middle East and Turkey region, where a series of live presentations were broadcast to delegates. Globally, around 600 delegates logged on to a single 30-minute broadcast covering the basic principles of sustainability in Unilever.

Leadership development

In 2010, we introduced the Unilever Leadership Development Programme (ULDP), specifically to align the personal development plans and careers of our most senior leaders to our new Compass strategy. Approximately 100 of our most senior executives participated in the programme in 2010. Based on the success of the programme, which is delivered with the active participation of our CEO Paul Polman and the Unilever Executive, and with contributions from Harvard Business School academics, plans are underway to roll out the ULDP to the next level of 500 executives through 2011 and 2012.

Additionally, we have continued our successful leadership programmes for those employees who we see as ‘high potential’ for becoming senior leaders in the future. We now have 11 programmes covering more than 250 high ‘potential’ individuals.

Our Four Acres training and leadership development facility in the UK continues to provide high-quality training opportunities for our senior leadership and others. In 2010, we announced plans to open a similar leadership development facility in Singapore – called Four Acres Singapore - to support our talent development efforts in Asia, a region where we are likely to see much of our future growth.

Employee engagement

We put great effort into engaging with employees to find out whether they understand the company’s mission and their role within it, what their views of Unilever are and what they believe needs to change to achieve our ambitions.

We gather feedback from our employees through our Global People Survey (GPS). The results of our latest employee survey in 2010 showed that the level of employee engagement, one of our key indicators, saw a significant increase. Our score had hovered around the 65% for several years, but in 2010 we saw a marked jump to 73%.

Results also showed that 78% of managers feel that Unilever’s leadership has communicated a motivating vision for the future and 83% of employees felt proud to work for Unilever. The survey confirmed the areas for further improvement, such as the need for faster decision-making, addressing poor performance and regular feedback from managers. We expect to see improvements in these scores as we achieve results from the programmes we put in place in 2010. These focus on embedding a performance culture and streamlining decision-making.

Our next GPS will take place in 2012. During 2011 we will continue to carry out interim or ‘Pulse’ surveys with our management teams across the business.