How Unilever used tech to upgrade their employee experience
Unilever is a multinational consumer goods company with over 155,000 employees in 190 countries. With a strong focus on employee experience and over 1,500 employees just working on that subject, Unilever leveraged IT and tech innovation to transform the way their people worked.
"As we do for our consumers, we strive to provide a great everyday experience for all our employees as well, and technology has been a critical enabler in this journey." ~ BP Biddappa , CHRO, Global Home Care at Unilever
"All our key processes from recruitment, learning, performance management, recognition, engagement, and communication, to managing exits, have online interfaces. This helps us tremendously in a couple of ways – enhanced transparency and efficiency. The days when an employee had to struggle to complete formalities or find out what the appraisal reads like are now far behind," writes Biddappa. "Our systems allow for real-time feedback and tracking."
Unilever’s research indicated that their employees spent a lot of time navigating internal services and lost almost a day of productivity every week on non-value-added tasks.
To tackle that, they launched a digital solution that offered an integrated, single point of entry for all employees, where they can easily access information, and get their complex queries resolved by an AI chatbot. Complementing the technology is a front-facing People Experience team, to ensure end-to-end support for employees.
The digital transformation seems to have also enabled culture change at Unilever.
"We have built an online platform where any employee in any part of the business can raise a concern and if he or she is unable to get an appropriate response within a week’s time, it gets escalated to the top management for resolution so that things keep moving forward," Biddappa explains. "The measure of success for this initiative is based on the average closure time and the number of repeated issues of the same nature. We have also crowdsourced powerful ideas from our employees through online crowdsourcing and hackathons."
The technology and automation resulted in over one million searches and interactions and have freed up around 300,000 hours annually for HR and employees.
The team reported an increase in employee satisfaction scores and a quicker query resolution turnaround time as well.
Unilever is also conscious about listening to its employee feedback and involving them in tech decisions.
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"When we talk about the voice of the employee, we're looking at two sides. We have our feedback mechanism through NPS surveys and regular pulse checks to measure the overall sentiment. There's a lot of quantitative data coming out from these," said Tom Dewaele , their Former Global Head of Employee Experience.
"But we give equal importance to qualitative feedback as well. Apart from user groups and deep-dive interviews with employees, we have a group of about 1,000 employees called Digital Ninjas. They're a team of people across the organization from different backgrounds and abilities, who get early releases of our digital solutions, test those upfront, and give us feedback about the accessibility and overall experience."
And that makes all the difference.
When organizations have an accurate and clear understanding of how their employees use technology in their jobs and what they need from those solutions, it automatically reflects in their digital employee experience.
What do your employees actually need from the tech they use at work? And how can your organization meet those needs?
We want to leave you with these two questions to ponder.
This is an excerpt from?our latest blog post , where we have curated our favorite employee experience transformation stories. Head over to the blog to read more inspiring journeys of companies and leaders who revolutionized their employee experience and in turn, their business.