Coloplast takes a strategic approach to development

Article Type: HR at work From: Strategic HR Review, Volume 8, Issue 3

Short case studies that demonstrate best practice in HR

Coloplast Limited is a wholly owned subsidiary of Coloplast A/S of Denmark and has responsibility for the sales, marketing and distribution of Coloplast stoma care, wound care and continence care products in the UK and Ireland, where it employs around 400 people. It is a very successful organization achieving successive years of double-digit growth, generating around £150 million in revenue and accounting for around 20 percent of the company’s global revenue.

When I joined Coloplast in July 2007 I conducted a survey of all our UK employees to get an understanding of what makes us successful – we wanted to know what people particularly enjoyed about working at Coloplast thereby ensuring we knew what we needed to sustain – as well as getting their perspective on the key issues that the company needed to address. We had a fantastic 80 percent response rate from the survey and we put this down to the fact that our employees are passionate about what they do, that they enjoy their work and that they want Coloplast to continue to make our work worthwhile while addressing a few issues that they felt were holding us back from further success. To help achieve such a good response rate, line managers were deployed to ensure that employees realized their opinions count and the HR team sent a daily tracker of our response rate during the last few days before the deadline. I believe employees acknowledged that this was their opportunity to influence the HR strategy for the next three years and those that cared gave us their views. The conclusions from the survey became one of the key influences on our current HR strategy.

Understanding the issues

A previous Investors in People accreditation, our annual global employee loyalty and satisfaction measurement, a range of focus groups with our managers and some analytics added to the survey results to provide lots of insight into what needed to be addressed to continue to enable the organization to progress,both as a senior management team and as an HR team in alignment with our UK objectives and our global strategy. One of the key areas was around pro-actively developing capability – enabling people for their current role and their next. Previously development had been on a needs basis and was therefore quite reactionary. Our staff turnover was higher than we wanted and the survey revealed one of the main reasons was that people did not feel they were being developed and progressed through the organization.

It was important to look ahead so we developed a three-year plan. One of the fundamental themes behind the plan was that we needed to work in partnership with the business and as a business we needed to adopt a “one company”mindset. We launched the HR business partners concept within the UK HR team and have subsequently launched business partnering for HR globally – a project I have been proud to lead. Previously we did not have a learning and development plan and one of the main elements of the new strategy is a joined up, strategic plan with dedicated resources.

Launching the strategy

The HR strategy began in October 2007. We established the foundations by launching a new appraisal process and recruitment training for all managers, as well as transforming the HR team, bringing in additional, fully qualified resources and reviewing our key processes. As a senior management team we established our people aspirations and our aim for Coloplast UK to be recognized as:

• a great place to work;

• a UK employer of choice in the healthcare industry;

• a company that cares for its employees; and

• an organization that looks to the future and builds the business for growth.

These aims form the basis of our HR strategy and we have devised a variety of initiatives to achieve these aspirations. Every employee now has a personal development plan. We can look at where individuals want to go within the company, within what time frame and how realistic those aspirations are. Once we know what movement we can anticipate, we can look at preparing people for their next role. This also helps us address recruitment needs (particularly for business critical roles), identify capability requirements and strengthen our people pipeline.

A key element of our strategy has been reviewing our management structure as well as the capability of our leaders and managers. We took the following steps:

• 1.

  we introduced a new layer of management (“MT”) underneath the senior management team (“SMT”) and partnered each member of the MT with a coach from the SMT, outside of the direct reporting relationships;

• 2.

  a sales management development program was launched to ensure that all sales managers are able to successfully manage our field-based sales teams; and

• 3.

  we recognized that a lot of our managers were in management roles but had insufficient experience and development, so we introduced a range of management modules to set them up for success.

We also introduced support for all levels of staff in obtaining professional qualifications. Everyone was given the opportunity to apply, by outlining the benefits of the course at both a company and personal level and gaining the support of their line manager. Eleven percent of our employees are now studying for a range of professional qualifications – everything from English lessons to masters degrees.

With an ambition to reach out to all employees with a joined-up offering of development, while maximizing our investment and moving away from a dependence on classroom-based training, we introduced an online learning resource called“The Coloplast Academy”, which is enabling a shift to a continuous learning mindset. We are utilizing the Academy in a variety of ways. We want staff to view it as a rich source of information and each department has its own page on the Academy website where it can upload news and information.

Business benefits

We are already seeing business benefits from the initiatives we have introduced and the following results were achieved in 2008:

• staff turnover dropped to 22 percent from around 30 percent;

• seventy percent of all UK managers were recruited internally – up from 50 percent;

• recruitment fees reduced by £150,000;

• we achieved high employee engagement of 81 percent; and

• the capability of our line managers increased by 4.2 percent in just nine months, and is higher than the company’s average globally, as measured through 90-degree feedback within the newly launched appraisal process.

As well as being more cost-efficient than classroom-based training, the Coloplast Academy enables us to reach everyone in a short space of time,ensuring that knowledge is shared widely and quickly. We are also seeing the benefits of our one company mindset. For example, all managers, no matter where they work within the company, receive the same experience and development opportunities and are managing their teams better as a result.

Moving forward

The introduction of this strategy provided some great experiences as well as some rich learning. One of our key lessons was not trying to do too much too fast and being clear what “working in partnership” really means. We need to bear in mind that the business needs to be able to cope with the initiatives we are adopting as an organization and we need to create “room”and flexibility to adapt our plan as we evolve. The strategy was very much about joined up, proactive thinking, building a one company mindset and aligning the UK plans with meeting the goals of the UK and global business. We achieved around 80 percent of our KPIs in year one and years two and three of the strategy will see us introducing new initiatives as well as building on the existing ones.

Tess O’Kane

About the author

Currently HR director at Coloplast, Tess O’Kane spent ten years in commercial roles before moving into HR and development. Her previous HR and development roles include group head of leadership and management development as well as acting HR director within the Emap group and head of HR at Frontline. Tess O’Kane can be contacted at: gbtok@coloplast.com