COVER STORY / HR AT UNILEVER
GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE,
LOCAL EXPERTISE
With hundreds of food, beverage, cleaning agent and personal care products in its portfolio, there’s a fair chance that you encounter at least one of Unilever’s brands every day. Iain Hopkins talks to Danielle Van Den Broek about working for one of the world’s oldest multinational companies It doesn’t take much to lure a hardened magazine editor from the confines of his office and into Sydney’s rapidly growing northwest corridor, the heart of which is Epping. In fact, all it takes is the promise of a Magnum ice cream. Although the average consumer may only be vaguely aware of the Unilever name, they are almost guaranteed to know the products that Unilever produces: Bertolli, Bushells, Continental, Lipton, Streets, Dove, Sunsilk, Omo, Surf, Domestos, Rexona, Lynx – to name just a few. The Anglo-Dutch multinational consumer goods company owns over 400 brands and employs around 174,000 people globally. With the Magnum setting a relaxed mood, Danielle Van Den Broek, vice president human resources at Unilever Australia and New Zealand, opened up about the importance of purpose in business; why Unilever is still the ‘‘icon” for marketing graduates; and Project Half, an initiative that any massive organisation with layers of complexity and bureaucracy might care to borrow.
HR AT UNILEVER Van Den Broek, a 15-year veteran of the company, has worked in the Netherlands, Singapore and now Australia. Each role, she says, has prepared her for the one she’s doing now. As a member of the Unilever senior leadership team in Australia and New Zealand, she holds overall HR responsibility for operations in those two countries and for some 1,700 people. Her HR team of around 20 members is divided into business partners, expertise teams,
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payroll and HR within the four factories based in Australia and New Zealand. Globally, Unilever has outsourced part of its transactional HR activities to Accenture. In addition to standard ‘head of HR’ functions, Van Den Broek says she has two other focus areas: providing strategic direction to the organisation and building a “purpose-driven” organisation.
TYING HR TO BUSINESS STRATEGY
Did you know? Unilever was founded in 1929 by the merger of the British soap maker, Lever Brothers (founded in 1885 by William Hesketh Lever), and the Dutch margarine producer, Margarine Unie.
In the first of these areas, Van Den Broek works closely with CEO Clive Stiff and the other executives. When Stiff started in the role two years ago, he developed a long-term business strategy. Every year this is refreshed and tweaked slightly. Unilever’s HR function uses a process and methodology called Talent and Organisational Readiness. All HR professionals are trained in-house on how to use the same methodology. Using the business strategy as its base, the HR team takes information gleaned from management interviews, research, internal and external benchmarks, and applies it to four key pillars: talent, skills, organisation and culture. “We’ll then say, ‘If this is the business strategy and we look at our talent today, what are the strengths and what are the gaps to fill in order to execute this strategy?’ And we do the same for organisation, where we go into organisational design, organisa tional effectiveness, benchmarking and all the metrics around that topic. The same applies to skills and to culture. We get a robust scan of where our strengths are, as well as the gaps where we need to fill or bridge to execute the strategy.”
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3/07/2014 4:38:40 PM