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WACL NED Talk – Are you listening to your employees effectively enough? Members-only

June 12, 2023 @ 12:15 pm - 1:30 pm

These are challenging times for businesses and boards.
Employees engagement needs to be at the top of the agenda and done effectively.
Unemployment is at the lowest level since 1974 and many sectors have critical vacancies.
The cost of living crisis is affecting employees across the country at all levels.
Employees join companies and stay when they are aligned with the purpose, culture and purpose.
Employees want a voice but not all boards are listening.

We will hear about different approaches to listening from Mira Magecha , Coach,  NED and former Chief People Officer and Roisin Donnelly, NED leading employee engagement at NatWest and from Amy Lawson who served as the employee representative on the board of FTSE 100 software company Sage and is Sage Chief Corporate Affairs Officer. The talk will be chaired by Zoe Howorth.

It is an important and urgent topic for everyone. Furthermore Marketeers are specially well suited for this role on a Board as we bring valuable skills to the boardroom table ( like active listening, intuition and empathy).

this is a members only event so please let [email protected] know if you would like to be added to the list.

Key take-aways from the session

Context

As life has normalised post pandemic, hybrid working has remained with 3x the level of hybrid working pre pandemic and 40% of adults now working FT/PT from home.  850,000 working people have exited the workforce since Covid and a lot of those are in the 50+ professional segment.  Unemployment is at an all-time low since 1974 so employees don’t have to work for a company, and some are choosing not to work at all.  There is increasing pressure on finding and keeping talent and it’s never been more important to understand our employees, where they are at, and have responsive conversations with them.

When Business Secretary and Prime Minister during the last decade, Theresa May, called for businesses to give workers a voice on company boards, either by having an employee representative sitting on the board, an employee shadow board/employee panel to help guide the board, or assigning the representation of employees on the Board to one of the NED’s, giving them explicit obligation to engage with the workforce, report to the board, chair a stakeholder committee.

It is now part of the UK corporate governance code that all listed / large companies should take employee engagement seriously.  The board has got to listen to its people and report back via comms and in their Annual Report how it’s listening to employees.

Perspective from NED with responsibility for Employee Engagement

  • Voice of the employees often comes from a very different perspective – the colleagues contributing will be younger than or very different from the board members
  • Having employee panels is a very effective way to manage direct employee engagement. The panel should be diverse – different ages, functions, tenures – fully representative of the workforce. Make sure the panel is not selected as ‘trade union officials’ to ensure the board understands the broader audience.  It should also have an agenda and clear terms of reference in terms of what is in scope and not in scope for the panel to focus on or be involved with: strategy, purpose, and culture goes across all groups/functions
  • Listening to employees doesn’t mean that the Board is going to make every employee happy; the key win may be that the board is aware of the issues
  • Some issues will be clearly HR issues and will need to be passed to HR to deal with – they are not employee engagement issues, they are HR policy issues
  • Can be intimidating for employees meeting board members so consider other ways to put them at their ease and get the best out of the meeting, e.g., speed dating meeting in pairs with individual members of the board
  • Women are very skilled in the role of representing employees / employee engagement NED. Spencer Stuart survey showed that 66% of NEDS responsible for employee engagement are women
  • Chairing this function really helps you get up to speed quickly on a new board
  • Some boards have more than one person/NED responsible for employee engagement. Unilever and BAT believe it is a whole board responsibility.  Even with one single NED in charge you need to get the whole board listening
  • On example of an employee engagement model is to bring more than one board member into the frame. The NED responsible for employee engagement can take other board members along to the meetings with the panel, choose topics to focus on, get experts to come along and speak on topics like pay and benefits, sustainability and purpose, exec pay, use break out groups, and then more than one person can take the output back to the board to discuss what to do / change / build into strategy
  • Very important input to REMCO’s too, to listen to what’s happening, impact of CoL crisis, decisions around extra payments given and a what level – understanding of employees’ perspectives and experiences is critical to these decisions
  • Show the employees what you have changed as a result of listening to them: is it in the annual report, evidence that the board is listening and employees are a key priority for the Board. Show how it is making a difference
  • Employee panels help enormously with feedback loops to colleagues. Feedback loops can be managed by the REMCO Chair but the issues raised often go beyond pay and benefits, and so it can make the REMCO Chair a huge role.  Important to be clear about what the remit is.  It’s an important enough issue to have a dedicated board member for employee engagement. Also, two-way communication is enhanced if it’s managed via an employee panel
  • Employee surveys are another very useful tool to gather employee input for boards – both big informal surveys, and more informal pulse point checks. Also visits to sites, breakfasts with new starters
  • Important for Board to take the position of NED responsible for employee engagement seriously; some boards will pay an additional fee to the NED for this role, and more should

Perspective from an Employee Representative / Colleague Board Associate on the Board:

  • It’s a two-way role: educating colleagues on the role of the board – what it’s there to do, how it represented shareholders and maintained governance of the company and secondly, bringing employees views into the board
  • Not there to be a ‘workers on board’ role; didn’t officially represent colleagues whilst did spend a lot of time getting to know as many people as possible so they knew who she was and could share thoughts and perspectives
  • Freedom to bring challenge into the room, be authentic and there be no repercussions for bringing challenge
  • Importance of induction and coaching new employee representatives. Understanding protocols of the board room really helps – what to do and what not to do, how to best float questions and to whom.  The colleague will have more impact if they are given a good grounding in the ways of the board and how it all works, and understanding that you can’t take everything into the board room or deciding what can be shared back to colleagues that might be commercially sensitive, e.g. merger and acquisition plans
  • Importance of having representatives from different functions
  • Anticipating colleague responses: expectations and the issues they wish to raise have changed post Covid. Colleague’s mental health, social justice for example.  Do horizon scanning and taking the temperature of employee sentiment to help look out for emerging topics that could become important to employees
  • Calculating when you must do something, or when you have to say something, or a combination of the two – use a framework, beyond just the organisational values, to help decide where the board stands on a particular topic. What do the key stakeholders think and how can we make sure we respond appropriately
  • Silence on a topic is not a neutral response
  • How people want to be communicated with has changed – use of social media, using the channels where your people are already for colleague comms
  • Marketers tend to make really good board members or board associates – very used to putting ourselves in the audience / customers’ shoes, bringing a perspective from the outside world
  • Be aware of and deal with the realities of today’s workforce. After Covid, businesses saw their trust increase; made big commitments during the period that we need to continue to live up to; people coming into the workforce now have bigger expectations of the companies they work for
  • Must feel we are listening even if we don’t always deliver what they are asking as there may be good reasons for that
  • Important to feel an obligation to colleagues in this role and be comfortable talking thematically about what might be contentious or difficult issues, and with saying ‘no’ to one issue raised because another related issue is in the process of being addressed
  • Employees are often surprised by how fast board can move and decisions are made
  • Importance of asking for advice and feedback from your fellow board members as to how effective the Colleague Board Associate role is being and where it could be enhanced

Perspective from Chief People Officer

  • Accept that, at the beginning, it’s a learning process discovering what’s going to work for the organisation and what will work for the Board
  • If you create a panel of colleagues, it must be representative of age, diversity, different locations / international markets, departments, functions as well as keeping it manageable in size.
  • Try to avoid too many pre-meetings before seeing the board or the board NED; accept that colleagues may feel nervous and not fully understand what the board is responsible for
  • Can use a colleague panel to test colleague reactions on topics such a gender pay-gap reporting, and how best to feed back.
  • Head of People can support the NED with responsibility for employee engagement by connecting them or other board members directly with colleagues, particularly for feedback on what’s working / not working / needs adaptation – two-way flow of information is important
  • If an issue raised by employees requires a deeper dive and investigation, the NED focussed on employee engagement can be responsible for this

Speaker Biographies

Roisin Donnelly

Roisin Donnelly is a Non Executive Director of Premier Foods and Homeserve and a former Non Executive Director of Just Eat, Bourne Leisure and Holland &amp Barrett. She has served on Advisory Boards for Coca Cola European Partners and the John Lewis Partnership. Roisin is the former Brand Director for Procter &Gamble Northern Europe and led P&G’s “Thank You, Mum” campaign for P&G’s sponsorship of the Olympic Games. Her previous roles include Brand Director for P&amp G Fine Fragrances in North and South America and Brand Director for Cosmetics and Fragrances for Europe, Middle East and Africa. She has also led P&G’s Western European hair care business. She is a former council member of the Advertising Standards Authority. She led Diversity and inclusion for P&G UK. Roisin is passionate about coaching, developing and mentoring in the industry. She is a former President of WACL, a former Chair of Cosmetic Executive Women and a Fellow and Former President of the Marketing Society, Roisin was born and educated in Glasgow and is married with 3 daughters. She loves travel and the theatre.

 

Mira Magecha

Mira is a highly experienced former Chief People Officer and Leadership Coach with 25 years of experience working for leading tech and consulting organisations such as Just Eat, Getir and Capgemini.  She also serves as a Non-Exec director and Adviser to smaller founder-led businesses as an advocate for the People function.

Most recently Mira founded play for change – a company that helps organisations and leaders navigate change and achieve their goals through the power of play. Play is a serious business, and it can be the key to unlocking creativity and innovation, building resilience, and fostering a positive workplace culture. Mira has partnered with leaders, colleagues, and clients through times of uncertainty and understands the power of embracing change and creating a workplace culture that values individual growth and development.

Mira’s passion for food and fitness is also well-known.  She has a side hustle making and selling award winning granola www.granology.uk. She enjoys working out at the gym – lifting weights, cycling, and playing with her miniature Pinscher Ziggy, who inspired the name play for change. Let’s play seriously and win big together.

 

Amy Lawson

Amy leads corporate affairs at Sage and is responsible for internal and external reputation and engagement. She sets the global strategy across PR, colleague communications, public affairs and industry analyst relations, responsible for managing risk and identifying opportunity. In 2017, Amy was selected as Sage’s first ever Colleague Board Associate, attending all Board Meetings . She wrote regular blogs for colleagues about this experience and Sage’s learnings as one of the first FTSE 100 businesses to create the role. Amy credits this experience with helping Sage colleagues to understand the role of the Board, and also for broadening her own appreciation of the value of fresh and wide-ranging perspective on day to day operations. Previously, Amy was head of the Cabinet Office media operation as a civil servant for Her Majesty’s Government and Head of Communications for Channel 4 News, where she was responsible for protecting and promoting the reputation of the national news programme, its journalism and its presenters.

 

Zoe Howorth

A classically trained marketer who began life at Procter and Gamble, Zoe progressed to United Biscuits were she built strong commercial awareness , Zoe then joined the Coca-Cola Company in 1998. Over a 15 year period Zoe progressed from Brand Manager to Marketing Director, across this time she led the marketing campaigns from idea to execution across all of the brands , led international campaigns and worked in developing and rolling out marketing capability programs (The Coca-Cola way of Marketing) . In her final role as Marketing Director she oversaw Coca- Cola’s marketing of the 2012 Olympic games and also served for 3 years on the GB Leadership team which stewarded the whole business through the breadth of strategic, legal, HR, customer and corporate affairs. Finally, Zoe was the lead interface with the companies Sales and distribution partners (Coca-Cola Enterprises) where her role was to deliver inspirational programs which could work ‘at the point of purchase’ in a collaborative way with the sales teams. More recently, Zoe has transitioned into portfolio non-executive roles and holds several board positions. Between 2017 – 2021 Zoe sat on the board of Playfinder, a tech business enabling the online booking of sports facilities across the UK and also chaired Houston PR which is an innovative PR consultancy with an excellent pedigree in both consumer and financial PR.

Today, Zoe sits on the board of Water Babies International, a global baby swimming business, AG Barr PLC, where she chairs the ESG committee and most her most recent appointment is to the board of International Schools Partnership (ISP). ISP is the worlds 5th biggest education group focusing on improving the access to high quality education . Zoe chairs the ESG and brand development committee.

Zoe is interested in Climate change and understanding how business can move forward with this agenda, she sits on the communication committee at Chapter Zero.

Details

Date:
June 12, 2023
Time:
12:15 pm - 1:30 pm
Event Category:
Event Tags:
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