COVID-19 reinforced our HR strategies: Richard Stone of Mondelēz SEA
Richard Stone, the Human Resources Director for the Southeast Asia operations of Mondelēz International, leads the HR team for a US$1.1 billion business that's both in an essential category—snack sales have skyrocketed during the last few months—and highly reliant on supply chain continuity. In an interaction with People Matters, he shared how he and his team have been managing the disruption of COVID-19 and planning for the post-COVID environment.
How have you and your HR team been meeting the needs of your people around the region, these past few months?
Our top priority has always been the health and safety of our people, and it has become even more so during this crisis. Not only do we value the need to do what’s right for our employees during these difficult times, but also we understand that our teams are playing a critical role in ensuring that essential food supply chains around the world remain secure. Safeguarding their welfare as they continue to serve our consumers has been ever more paramount.
We also quickly realized that once the fundamental safety of our people is addressed, there are other equally important psychological needs that must be met, and the HR team have been working hard to ensure we created organizational focus on these important elements. With that in mind, we prioritized six pillars of various initiatives to help our employees navigate the new reality:
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Assuring Safety
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Demonstrating Care for our people
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Providing Clarity in these highly dynamic times
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Creating Connections amongst our teams
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Supporting the Mind and Heart
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Recognition and Celebration
What are some initiatives you’ve implemented here in SEA that have translated well to global operations?
Our six-pronged approach has been widely recognized through our organization, benefitting other business units who are similarly innovating various ways to navigate this unprecedented situation.
Since SEA is such a diverse market, we have the advantage of offering to the rest of our organization a wide variety of initiatives that can also apply to other markets. Some of these are:
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Company transport for employees where public transport has been halted
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Creative communication channels where email connections prove insufficient
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Local engagement activities where colleagues could benefit from alternative ways of coping with homestay
Similarly, we have benefited from the wealth of experience across our global enterprise, and have leveraged practices from our global HQ as well as other business units. For example, we have implemented a rigorous Special Situations Management discipline and introduced manager toolkits to help teams cope with the crisis.
Business leaders have needed more support than usual to manage the challenges and cope with the stress of this situation. What are some ways your team has been supporting the senior leadership?
One example is providing information. We realize that leaders can make better decisions when they have the right information to act on. Our HR team has acted as a powerful feedback channel to understand how colleagues are coping both from informal check-ins as well as structured team discussions. We also conducted a SEA-wide Pulse survey to better assess our colleagues' needs and feedback, which helped leaders react and adapt their team strategies in an effective way.
Another example is regular connection and guidance. In a weekly project management connection with our SEA Leadership Team, we provide guidance on the people agenda: what is needed and where we must provide attention and support.
Facilitating these discussions where one leader can learn from experiences of another have proved helpful not only in a practical way, but also in creating a sense of leadership community around this crisis.
How would you say this pandemic has affected your HR strategy and the approach to business resilience?
The scale and magnitude of this pandemic has provided us with many new insights and allowed us to sharpen focus on our priorities in a way that is responsive to the current context.
For example, we remain focused on building quality talents and this situation has provided us with a unique opportunity to expose our talents to an unprecedented development and learning opportunity both in leadership skills as well as in technical adaptability.
We remain focused on increasing diversity and driving organizational engagement and this situation has allowed us to fine-tune our understanding of diverse home-lives, as well as help us understand the core elements of engagement that matter the most to our people.
We remain focused on a local-first approach to enact agility and simplification and this situation has given us outstanding clarity on what is truly important to each local market so that we can act swiftly towards the right outcomes.
In summary, the situation has reinforced our strategies with a deeper understanding of how to drive them in a more effective way.
Based on what has worked well in the past months, what other changes do you foresee going forward in the way you and your fellow leaders work and view people management? What role do you expect HR to play in the post-crisis adaptation?
Even before COVID-19, our countries had in place flexible work arrangements for our employees. We see this being leveraged more and more going forward. We are also increasing our team connections through our townhalls, virtual check-ins and team bonding activities, thereby maintaining a positive morale as we believe that we will get stronger together.
Our culture at Mondelēz is based on an agility and growth mindset, with a set of values and behaviours that describe what we believe in, what we stand for and what guides our actions and decisions. It has become a common language we use to define what success looks like, how we evaluate talent, provide coaching and development. We have a great foundation to build upon to help us overcome the challenge of today to become even better tomorrow. As we go forward, managers inspiring their teams to live up to our values amidst a dynamic external environment will be further spotlighted and we are confident in our people’s ability to do this.
The HR function, in many ways, will help drive this important role of our managers moving forward. Already we are mobilizing to improve ways of working within the HR function, simplify our process tremendously, and invest dedicated focus both to partnering with the business as well as creating an outstanding employee experience in all our markets.