2021 Virtual Employee Engagement Summit

Employee engagement has long been seen as an optional extra, to be delegated to an HR department which itself is seen as a cost centre. Professor Alex Edmans will use 28 years of evidence to show that it’s fundamental to a company’s success and should be a CEO-level issue. The talk will also provide practical tips for making employee engagement a reality.

– Why happiness is the best measure of engagement
– Tracking employee happiness through Covid
– How positivity leads to business success
– How to build happy productive teams

Jody will discuss how the Internal Communications team Lloyds Banking Group responded during the initial phase of the Coronavirus pandemic and adapted their approach to content and channels to make sure colleagues were supported. This will include how Lloyds Banking Group utilised an existing mobile channel and saw the number of app users double and how simplified their approach to content production and delivery.

2020 has been a challenging year for companies around the globe. How did your organisation respond to the crisis initially and where are you now on your transformation journey? Are you hoping for the best or are you actively shifting your priorities at unprecedented speeds? In this session, we will showcase how many companies are managing to switch gears on their approach to employee feedback and engagement, providing crucial direction to business leaders during the first months of the crisis. We will examine emerging topics that organisations are struggling with right now and how solutions might have changed. And we will discuss why purpose, empathetic leadership, agility, and a human-centred approach to employee experience will be key to success going forward.

Birthe Mester, Global Head for Performance, Engagement and Culture will talk about why her practical guide to driving results through systematic engagement, Inform – Connect – Engage, helped managers at Deutsche Bank to really understand how they can pro-actively drive behavioural change and with that affect long lasting transformation. Her approach won an industry award.

Employee Engagement is more than an employer-sanctioned GDPR compliant communications platform although that’s a good start. (The frontline is particularly challenging) Come see how world-class brands from Shell to Avis to TK Maxx started their initiatives and achieved significant results from a multi-prong approach to not just engage & retain workers but excel even during a pandemic.

Freya Steffen will be highlighting how at HelloFresh employee engagement starts with employee experience, especially in time like these. She will look at how HelloFresh approached employee engagement back in 2016 and how it has evolved to today’s approach of today. The aim of the business if is to have the employee at the heart of everything they do.

A conversation with our client BNP Paribas. During this interview, Jessica Roberts, Transformation Consultant at CoachHub, interviews Rachel Le Maire, UK Talent Development Manager at BNP Paribas. During this conversation Jessica and Rachel discuss the most effective methods for engaging talent development and how CoachHub is supporting BNP Paribas’ leaders of tomorrow with digital coaching.

Understanding what employees value, delivering novel engagement opportunities and measuring results are all key elements of UCD’s employee engagement strategy. A strategy designed to help UCD become a university and employer of choice.

Working in a large organisation across 60 buildings on 2 campus plus overseas operations, a common comment overheard at our events is “I’ve being communicating with you for years via email, it’s really nice to meet you”. Bringing employees together, be it to deliver information, learn a skill or improve health or wellbeing is central to our approach.

This session is designed to share ideas and practical approaches that we have used to build engagement levels and start to change the culture of the organisation for the better.

We will explore some key insights, learnings and questions regarding the power of purpose, strategy and culture in managing disruptive times (including the pandemic) while forming Guiding Principles to generate lasting change in the New Better world.

How Bacardi is engaging Primos (employees) to build a NEW BETTER through an intense focus on Purpose, Capability, Belonging, Engagement and Connection.

Unilever has been on an Employee Experience journey since 2018, and is now developing its’ 3rd generation of the voice of the Employee program based on best practices and past learnings gains. We will be sharing how we use several tools to ensure the needs of the employee drive our prioritization, product design, and success measures.

Catherine will share how the Home Office has been engaging with staff through the pandemic, with a strong focus on the wellbeing of all colleagues. She will also discuss challenges and issues around embedding new working practices within the wider Civil Service context.

Zora will share lessons from what’s worked well to date from the regions that are a step ahead, and the emerging trends from brands adapting to the pandemic. As many organizations are re-examining how they adapt their business models and adapt their ways of working, Zora will also explore what value we can create for the C-suite as communication professionals. By the end of this talk, you’ll learn: how to adapt and transition into a recovery stage; what is working for those already in a recovery stage — and how they got there; the new emerging trends since COVID-19 and how to apply them.

‘Skilled managers – productive workplaces’ is an innovative project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) as part of their ground-breaking ‘Management Practices and Employee Engagement’ programme. The role of enhanced managerial capabilities in boosting engagement and solving the UK’s productivity puzzle has become a focus of intense debate in recent years. However, there is very little hard evidence either about what skills managers need or whether skills development can deliver more engaged teams and improved performance. This project seeks to fill this gap by designing an innovative training programme designed to give line managers the tools they need to handle complex and difficult workplace issues and then conducting rigorous organisational trials to measure its impact. In this presentation Paul Latreille and Richard Saundry, the UK’s leading academic experts on conflict management will examine early findings from the project and outline the key lessons for organisations seeking to boost engagement and productivity.

For HR leaders, having a holistic view of the employee journey is critical to developing your people and fuelling your company’s success. Unfortunately, with ‘survey platforms’, different surveys never talk to one another and data remains captive. As a result, analysing data across survey programs is painful and resource-intensive. But what if you could connect survey feedback and understand the full employee experience or how your employees are feeling in just a few clicks? Hear more about how we support Paysafe’s ability to discover how milestones like onboarding impact engagement over time, what we learn from exits and how they have navigated  the complexities associated with Covid. We will also cover:

• Why designing a measurement strategy is about more than just a single survey,
• How Technology can help connect survey feedback, understand the full employee experience and drive performance,
• What Paysafe was able to achieve in response to Covid, including ‘Safeguarding People, Wellbeing and their Future of Work strategy’.

Revaluating employee engagement from a customer perspective: The employees, the company and the external stakeholders. A case study presentation from the French multinational Saint-Gobain on how to reevaluate the employee engagement and turn it into something more holistic. Taking the perspectives and needs of the various internal and external customer groups into consideration while doing so. Presented by Jorgen Pedersen, Vice President Compensation & Benefits and International Mobility

During a crisis, employee experience is often one of the first things to be overlooked – with businesses instead focusing on how to minimise disruption and maintain a sense of ‘business as usual’. Over the last six months many companies have decided to pull back their employee listening strategies, fearing it’s the wrong time to be seeking feedback from employees. But in truth, employee feedback is one of the most powerful things an organisation can harness during a crisis or times of uncertainty.

During this session, we will discuss the reasons why organisations are so reluctant to gather employee feedback and explore some of the reasons feedback is so powerful – particularly during turbulent times. Finally, we’ll hear from Jessica Barlow, Director of HR and Talent at Foundry on their experience of surveying through COVID-19 and the actions they’ve taken

Research shows that an attractive and engaging company culture is one of the key determinant to be successful in tough job markets. With more than 100,000 employees and operations in 220 countries and territories, creating a unique, engaging and motivating culture is a key challenge for DHL Express.

Jonathan Ruff will share how by designing defining moments for employees, DHL Express created a global culture of engagement, recognised as #4 in the global Great Place to Work list.

With more than 27,000 collaborators worldwide, including 20,000 field workers, FM Logistic ensures the optimization of the global supply chain. Idriss Bentoumi will share how FM Logistic has been bringing all workers into its Digital Workplace no matter their role in the company or location in the world.

This session is designed to share LumApps’ Digital Workplace vision to connect and empower deskless workers.

How can leaders inspire and support effective change? Drawing on his experience in a variety of leadership positions in the European Commission, Stephen will set out some of the challenges he has confronted in driving change in the public sector.

He will share some of the lessons he has learnt along the way – what has worked in helping to build trust, get people on board and deliver effective organisational change, in spite of constraints.

Join Mark Heywood, Head of Performance and Recognition at Lloyds Banking Group, as he shares how they have successfully leveraged employee recognition to help enhance the culture of the business through the positive reinforcement of values and behaviours and how it has become even more important given the challenges of 2020.
Mark will discuss their journey of transformation and how their employee recognition programme continues to grow to become an even more integral part of the people strategy.
This session will explore how:
• to improve culture and performance through joined up strategy
• aligning your people to business objectives and company values and behaviours can improve culture and drive employee engagement
• LBG’s programme continues to grow and be an integral part of the people strategy

The Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) helps people get back on track by protecting them when authorised financial services firms fail. We’re independent, cover all regulated financial services in the UK, and are unique internationally for the scope of the protection we provide. Since our launch in 2001 we’ve come to the aid of millions of people and paid out billions in compensation. The FSCS is an organisation that makes a difference and in which our people make a difference.

So, ensuring that our people are connected to our social purpose; understand and are engaged with our strategy; experience a healthy and supportive culture and perhaps most importantly are excited about the future is essential.

In this interactive and practical session David Blackburn – Chief People Officer – will share the FSCS’s journey from engagement to experience. How they tackled cultural challenges; completely rethought their approach to internal communication and maximised the return on their investment. An approach that was recognised in multiple National Awards last year and has driven significant improvements in business performance.

The npower transformation journey started by fixing the fundamentals by introducing a five point plan, focussing on data, systems and processes, this was incredibly successful And saw some amazing results…. over £30m in cost savings, 200 processes optimised and 50% reduction in processing time… we had fixed the basics and regained control

But…we were chasing process perfection and it doesn’t exist

The presentation will focus on a lightbulb moment in npower to shift our focus to people not systems or processes. We introduced our cultural transformation programme and started doing the small things well. Supporting our people to have brilliant conversations with our customers by getting the basics right. By focussing on our Customers and engaging our people, the results looked after themselves seeing huge shift in ESAT CSAT and NPS…

Catherine Ward, British Council’s Chief People Officer, will review the benefits and learnings of the roll-out of a dynamic staff engagement process for more than 12,000 employees based in over 110 countries.

British Council is the United Kingdom’s international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities. Founded in 1934, it works in more than 100 countries across the world in the fields of arts and culture, the English language, education and civil society.

In 2019 it reached more than 80 million people directly and 791 million people overall, including online, through broadcasts and publications. In 2019, British Council’s People function adopted a new approach to understanding and acting on employee feedback. Using an innovative technology platform, rather than the traditional consultancy-led survey, the new global employee engagement survey was sent to more than 12,000 colleagues. This was the first time British Council had direct control over its employee engagement survey. This provided autonomy to use the survey as a strategic business diagnostic tool to better understand and improve employee experience. The full survey was followed up by a ‘pulse’ survey later that year to check progress against specific metrics, with the full support of the Senior Leadership Team.

A modern football stadium is actually several businesses in one: football matches, yes, but add to that retail, hospitality, catering, transportation, conference & banqueting, leisure activities, and NFL (with their own separate retractable pitch). With the new Tottenham Hotspur stadium, the vision was to design and deliver “6-star digitally enhanced customer experiences”; a seamless integration of these businesses, including delivering branded experience through our employees and partners, with over 62,000 customers attending live and many millions more engaging digitally.

Our mission:

• To create a place that delivers more than just sport – creating world class experiences through people • To create the most digitally advanced stadium in the world
• To develop a vibrant customer-centric culture to operate the new stadium experiences

Part of our vision included a social vision. We also wanted to attract, develop, and retain great people, with a focus on the area of Tottenham. Our focus is to recruit people who have the values, attitudes and skills (SPURS WAY) necessary to do the job regardless of experience. “We can teach a qualification, we cannot teach people to be respectful” Achieving these outcomes required a comprehensive customer and employee engagement strategy. This requires a comprehensive customer and employee engagement

Helen and Penny, who job share the role of Head of Internal Communications at NHS Digital, will talk through their strategy for internal communications to maintain engagement during COVID-19: working closely with HR partners to ensure colleagues are cared for and take care of themselves; creating connections across the organisation between senior leaders and the wider organisation and between colleagues through sharing stories and experiences, and tapping into colleagues’ pride and passion through celebration.

Melissa Hungerford will talk delegates through the employee and customer engagement journey at Dixons Carphone at a time of huge disruption to the retail/telecoms marketplaces in 2020 and look to the future as upheaval continues.

With a workforce of more than 100,000 employees and a presence in almost every country in the world, Bayer, an everyday household brand, was confronted with an unprecedented scenario for both employees and customers. Within the Crop Science division, it was mission critical to find solutions for the challenging and ever changing work environment for employees – as Bayer’s farmer customers relied on them to deliver key products for planting and harvest seasons that were underway in the Northern and Southern hemispheres. To avoid this health crisis from turning into a hunger crisis, Bayer had to keep employees working safely and efficiently – and live up to its vision, “Health for All, Hunger for None.”

In this session, Gaby will outline the challenges the Bayer Crop Science faced in the early days of the pandemic and how throughout these challenges, she and her team helped bolster employee engagement throughout the organization. She will also share insight into the future as Bayer looks to their Next Normal.

“Believe in Everybody”

Our world has changed and we need a different and more inclusive and empathetic form of leadership for these extraordinary times.

René will demonstrate through a series of unforgettable stories how some of the world’s most progressive companies and leaders have adapted to this volatile world.

No one who attends will leave without their approach to leadership having been enhanced forever.

A new focus on empathy, inclusion, support, and connection is vital to success now. Every company has been facing the enormous and urgent need to create a new support structure for employees at all levels – and we all managed to find things that helped unite people, keep energized and engaged despite the challenges. A few such things along with the learnings from us at PepsiCo Europe I’m going to share in my session.

Digitalisation is impacting Deutsche Telekom’s business model and thus our people. The half-life of knowledge and skills is decreasing rapidly, new skill-requirements constantly emerge. As lifelong learning is no longer just a buzzword but a competitive-critical reality, Deutsche Telekom started a company-wide initiative to develop a new culture of learning within the group. With the help of AI, digital and mobile learning platforms we aim to create a completely new learning experience and an environment where our people feel encouraged to take responsibility of their individual learning journey.

“If you don’t stick to your values when they’re being tested, they’re not values – they’re hobbies.” Employee engagement professionals have certainly been through a testing time with coronavirus – the pace, impact and sheer number of people affected are like no other crisis we’ve ever experienced. How did Tarmac use its organisational values as a guide for managing the crisis?