#YourVoiceMatters – the story behind the story
#YourVoiceMatters – that’s our Doosan Lentjes employer brand, sure, it’s also revealed on our careers page. But for Linda and me it is so much more than that. It’s our project, actually more our baby, because it wasn’t just some task someone had given us. But first things first.
Skills shortage, a word that is constantly flying around our ears. In any case, the challenge of inspiring people for one’s own company does not stop at us. And so, we too intended to consider what makes us special as an employer and sets us apart from others, and why future new colleagues should choose us. Up to that point, it could have been a fairly normal HR marketing project, in the course of which you think about a concept and then put it into practice.
But it wasn’t normal, and it was even less boring – that’s fair to say at this point. Before things could really get started, however, the HR department needed reinforcement. It didn’t take long before Linda appeared on the scene – what luck, because the two of us were immediately a super team, which is half the battle for a successful collaboration. We immediately threw ourselves into the project with great enthusiasm and thought about how we wanted to approach the whole thing. It was immediately clear to us that we wanted to involve the staff and the management in order to develop something together. It later became part of the internal language that Linda and I didn’t want to secretly and quietly lock ourselves in our offices and dictate to the company how it should be perceived as an employer. We aspired to ask everyone about it and that’s what we did – in an anonymous digital survey but also in face-to-face conversations, our so-called cluster tour, where we visited all departments of the company to discuss our values and benefits together. (You can find out exactly what that was like and what came out of it under this link: https://www.doosanlentjes.com/en/career/corporate-culture/)
In order to motivate colleagues to take part in surveys and the cluster tour, we thought: Just writing emails or articles in the staff magazine or on the intranet – that’s not enough. More has to happen. Among other things, we made small videos where we answered frequently asked questions about the project – sometimes just Linda and I, sometimes colleagues asked us questions. It was especially nice that many of us quickly lost our initial shyness in front of the camera – we all laughed a lot together. And it was great because we were able to involve the staff at this point and didn’t just present them with a fait accompli.
With the evaluation of the survey and the many conversations with our colleagues, one thing became clear to us: #YourVoiceMatters can do much more than just boost recruiting. #YourVoiceMatters is a corporate strategy that focuses on the most important resource in our company – namely our employees. This strategy helps us to become better and better as an employer and promotes a corporate culture that gives us the freedom to initiate improvements – also from within the workforce.
Why was the project anything but “normal”? Certainly, above all because we put so much heart and soul into “our baby”, because we put a lot of effort into thinking about how we could make Doosan Lentjes attractive for our colleagues and improve cooperation. We didn’t just want to do our job, we wanted to convey passion for the cause in order to inspire our colleagues to join in, because an employer brand has to be authentic and lived by the staff. Simply drawing values and benefits on paper and hanging them up in the corridors – freely according to the motto: Stand there, now please live it! That’s not our style – we want to take our people with us on the journey and become a top employer together!
We would like to mention why we both think Doosan Lentjes is a great employer. First of all, because the company gave us so much freedom to work on the project. In fact, no supervisor explicitly ‘assigned’ us to it – it was our idea, our concept and our implementation. Here you are not trapped in a tight corset and do the same thing every day. On the contrary – you have a lot of room for your own ideas and can get something going together – even across departments. Today, we are both very proud of what we have already achieved and look forward to what is still to come!
Your Diana & Linda