Promoting a supportive and healthier work environment for enhanced employee experience
We adopt a ‘people first’ mindset at the Group, which is focused on empowering, enabling and engaging our employees. Our mandate includes understanding the pain points of our 12,768 employees and re-design these experiences through employee journey mapping, enhancing our employee wellbeing through H.O.P.E wellbeing programme and strengthening the connection and sense of belonging of employees to the Group through People Experience communities.
Empowering, enabling and engaging our employees
When we launched the Group transformation journey in 2017, we recognised that for our transformation to be a success, we needed to co-create experiences with our employees and involve them from the beginning of our journey.
To ensure that everyone in the organisation embraces the “people first mindset”, our executive committee made strategic decision to establish a completely new function in Group HR called People Experience. It was established in 2018 and has been working alongside with the different business units across the Group, to map the experience of our people throughout their employee lifecycle - from onboarding until employee’s departure & co-design experiences with them. The employee journey mapping framework has helped us to build a practice of ongoing feedback and continuous enhancements.
In 2019, the People Experience team has been focusing on the following three pillars:
To promote a sense of belonging, connect people and inspire a happier work environment in our organisation, our People Experience team gathered people experience community champions. These champions are 180+ volunteers from the different parts of the business across the Group. They organised 80 activities in 2019, focused on collaboration, recognition, and wellbeing.
The Group launched the My Chalhoub employee app in 2018 which enabled all employees to connect with each other in an accessible and user-friendly way. From the leadership to the store frontline, people can interact and share their experiences and expertise, creating a sense of belonging and community. This app has the aim of informing, inspiring, recognising and engaging with employees, at a Group level, a brand level or within a community.
The MyChalhoub app has been really useful in connecting to people across the Group, and in sharing experiences, skills and talents not only within UAE, but across GCC. The app is very easy to access, and it also keeps us up to date with the events and sales happening across brands.”
To better understand the experience of our employee within Group and re-design experiences, processes, policies and ways of working, our People Experience team established a framework and a methodology. This allowed our managers to have a helicopter view of the experience of their people throughout their journey within the Group - from onboarding until employee’s departure. This 4 to 16-week EX mapping exercise includes a six-step process which begins with the EX survey, followed by interviews and focus groups. All the information that has been collected are analysed and used to create an employee journey map. People Experience team then facilitates a co-creation workshop for the division and help the managers develop their Employee Promise, define priority areas, develop a robust action plan and act as an accountability partner in the implementation of the redesigned experience.
We regularly closely track our employees’ EX progress through two KPIs. The KPIs that we use to measure this progress are the Employee Experience (EX) Score which measures the experience of our employees within three contexts: Culture (including wellbeing), Technology, & Workspace and the Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS), which measures employee loyalty to the organisation. These KPIs have been designed to become part of our managers’ KPIs and we intend to make these as mandatory people metrics in the next few years. Since 2018, most of the divisions and business units of the Group were able to establish their baseline people metrics.
In the upcoming year, we plan to collaborate with the Customer Experience (CX) team and conduct a Group-wide study to establish a clearer framework that will explore the link and correlation between employee experience and customer experience, measured by their respective Net Promoter Scores. We will also be rolling out the employee mapping journey exercise in other countries such as KSA, Kuwait, and Qatar.
In July 2019, the Group launched its employee wellbeing program called H.O.P.E. The vision of the programme is to create a work environment where wellbeing is a lifestyle. This program contributes to our overall purpose of empowering and enhancing our people experience at the Group, through:
H- Healthy body and mind
O- Ownership of individual wellbeing
P- Productivity while blending work and life
E- Emotional agility
This holistic wellbeing program brings together all existing wellbeing initiatives under one umbrella and has also created various new initiatives, encouraging our people to take ownership of their wellbeing in an agile work environment. Some of the activities included expert talks in different topics like mental health, healthy eating habits, sports challenges, yoga in the office, pampering day, bring your kids to work, meditation, and mindfulness.
In 2020, we will continue to partner with subject matter experts both internally and externally in offering additional wellbeing resources for our employees across the Group. For example, different wellbeing activities have been planned throughout the year help support employees on their physical, mental, social, financial wellbeing. We will also be devoting more focus on extending this wellbeing program to our frontline employees across the Group.
Chalhoub Group officially certified as a Great Place to Work ®
In December 2019, our Group received the Great Place to Work ® certification in the UAE, in recognition of our Group-wide efforts to invest in our people. This certification is based on direct feedback from our people across the Group, and is provided by a global authority on building, sustaining and recognising high-trust and high-performing workplace cultures. Our ‘people at heart’ approach has enabled us to achieve this milestone and has set us apart as an employer of choice.
Participating in the H.O.P.E. wellbeing activities reminds us to prioritise our mental, physical and emotional health and encourages us to maintain a healthy work – life balance.”
