December 2011

Engagement Catch-Up

By Jennifer Arapoff

H.J. Heinz Co. is one of the world's most successful global food companies, with iconic brands across six continents that generate annual sales approaching $11 billion.

Since its founding in 1869, the company's growth has been guided by a philosophy of local autonomy combined with global coordination. But the philosophy has posed challenges to creating a cohesive company-wide culture and measuring employee engagement. Under the leadership of William R. Johnson, chairman, president and chief executive officer, Heinz set out to build a high-performing workforce with engaged employees and a culture that develops talent and leaders within its ranks.

So Heinz turned to longtime partner Towers Watson to help it conduct its first global employee survey.

"We had a 30-plus-year relationship with Towers Watson," explains Steve Clark, Heinz's chief people officer. "In that time, we had tackled health care strategy and actuarial work successfully together, as well as several country-specific employee surveys. To meet our growth goals, we needed to more closely examine our company culture, so we turned to Towers Watson again."

People strategy goes global

When Clark came on board in 2002, more than 30 Heinz businesses were examining their culture using disparate tools and processes.

Yet the inconsistencies in culture among business units and locations were in many ways by design. Heinz employees rely on their knowledge of the local market to drive product innovation and sales. But as the workforce has evolved to encompass more parts of the world, the organization's people strategy has become increasingly complex.

Company leaders decided to conduct a global survey and to repeat it every two years. Towers Watson senior consultant Adam Zuckerman, already thoroughly familiar with the Heinz philosophy and business approach, worked closely with Clark's team to secure buy-in from senior executives across regions and business lines for a global employee survey.

"Nearly every multinational company struggles with how centralized or decentralized to be in its operations and people programs," Zuckerman says. "Given the company's decentralized approach to most things, Heinz had a particularly tough challenge in rolling out a globally consistent survey."

Heinz's Jackie Boucher, group leader of Global Leadership & Organizational Development, says, "We explained to our leaders in local markets that measuring employee engagement levels using standardized metrics was necessary to support the four pillars of our global growth strategy: expand the core (markets and products), accelerate growth in emerging markets, leverage scale and make talent an advantage."

In addition, Johnson wanted an instrument for measuring leadership development and managing talent, and processes for tracking these programs over time.

The survey process

First, Heinz created a global project team. Boucher served as project manager, working with a number of HR business partners across geographies and business units. The team met via webconference weekly or twice weekly, as needed.

Team members understood the survey tool had to be culturally acceptable in all parts of the world. Company leaders hoped it would also uncover what factors drove employee engagement and what impact various elements of the culture and the employee value proposition had on individual and business performance — for each location and for the company as a whole.

The survey questionnaire, which included 48 questions translated into 15 languages, was administered both online and via paper.

"Implementing a survey so large in scope certainly required the Heinz team to communicate with employees clearly and often, and to focus sharply on meeting deadlines all along the way," says David Eisenreich, Towers Watson account director and managing consultant of the Pittsburgh office.

Results speak for themselves

More than 27,000 employees participated in Heinz's first company-wide survey — an impressive 84% participation rate. The survey results revealed an equally impressive 71% employee satisfaction score.

The results also uncovered areas of opportunity, including the relationship between employees and supervisors. Marked as priorities around the globe: the clarification of individual employees' work purpose and responsibilities, the enhancement of training and development opportunities, and improvement in the area of feedback about workers' performance.

The team measured engagement factors across businesses and linked the survey results to business outcomes. Leaders held focus groups in local markets and applied the findings in creating customized solutions for individual Heinz locations. And Heinz senior executives used the survey results to establish global priorities for enhancing company culture and boosting engagement.

"The greatest value in the survey was that Towers Watson's tool gave us insights into what to do with all of these pieces of information," says Kimberly Janson, Heinz's vice president of Global Leadership & Organizational Development.

Moving forward

According to Towers Watson consultant Kelly Harkcom, the survey has allowed Heinz leaders to refine every element of the company's human capital strategy. "One goal is to help managers become effective coaches for their teams," she says, "and the company has made impressive progress in that area already."

In the months ahead, Heinz and Towers Watson will review benchmarking trends quarterly to ensure the next survey will be relevant and appropriately focused. The periodic survey will help leaders determine how the global Heinz employment brand can be continually reinforced at the functional, business and departmental levels, as appropriate.

"I'm not big on bureaucracy," says Clark. "With this survey, we've found that good people practices applied consistently make good business sense — and good people sense — and that's one reason we'll continue with periodic surveys."