A people-centered journey never ends
Chief People Officer (CPO)
Chief People Officer (CPO)
Chief People Officer (CPO)
Every day, workplaces are becoming more and more dynamic. Companies are building their reputations not only on what they achieve in business but also on the cultures they maintain for their workforces. Fundamentally, people are at the heart of all of this. In fact, research increasingly points to this fact — people really are what makes a company’s world go round. This has always been a strong belief for us at Ericsson — we innovate to make the world a better place, and we recognize that our people are the drivers of this.
As a company, if we want to keep our technology leadership position, we must be in constant change, be open to new challenges, and have a culture that supports this. That’s why, in recent years, we’ve decided to place even more emphasis on our people. We’ve been listening to them, collecting their insights through employee engagement surveys, culture hacks, leadership programs, and workshops to hear what works and what doesn’t, what they want more or less of, and what they feel that we can do better at. We’ve investigated, challenged, and experimented with new ways of working to find better practices. Ultimately, this led us to our largest cross-company culture transformation ever: Ericsson on the Move.
A company culture in transformation
As a comprehensive, personal endeavor including all of us, Ericsson on the Move was born as a high-impact way to reflect on our company journey — both as individuals and as an organization — to chart an even better course forward. Through workshops, webinars, projects, and events — you name it, we’ve been doing it in order to challenge ourselves to rethink cultural leadership and create the company we want to be part of.
The guiding stars in all of this — the core of the Move itself — have been our Five Focus Areas, which consist of empathy and humanness, cooperation and collaboration, fact-based and courageous decisions, executing speedily, and fostering a speak-up environment.
As the ideals that we believe should be modeled and experienced at our company at every level, every day, these focus areas have helped us to frame our efforts toward achieving defined goals in our culture, reminding us to increase our willingness to collaborate with each other, move quickly when opportunities arise, and make courageous and timely decisions to ensure that we never miss a chance to bring greater value and a more creative approach.
Results that speak for themselves
After fifteen months of Ericsson on the Move, I’m happy to report that the results have exceeded what we first imagined!
While 2020 has been a difficult year for us all in light of the current situation, today, we can see that this serious and challenging time is actually driving us to transform and improve even faster. Our most recent employee engagement survey, for example, shows that Ericsson on the Move has had a significant and consistent impact on engagement, raising employee satisfaction scores higher than they’ve ever been before!
Among the data, we see that our colleagues are feeling greater excitement for our company’s future, appreciation for our clear sense of direction, and an increased level of trust in our leadership. The results also indicate that our colleagues have successfully adopted the Five Focus Areas and have even improved their teams’ performance and workplace experience as a result. I can’t help but beam just from writing these developments here! We are truly moving in the right direction together.
Continuing to move forward
Despite the amazing progress that we’ve made over these recent years and all the impact we’ve created through Ericsson on the Move, we’re not about to stop here. We recognize that improvement is a journey rather than a destination, and that it involves continuous attention, effort, and involvement in how we lead our company forward.
Our future isn’t written yet, and we will continue to progress and become an ever-better place to work — a company that prides itself on being able to attract new talents from around the world with great employee benefits and opportunities as well as a culture they won’t find anywhere else. We know this is a challenge — but with our challenger mindset, we wouldn’t have it any other way.
I encourage you to read more about how we are fostering a speak-up environment in this blogpost