Employee engagement
At Diageo, we want employees to feel highly connected to our goals, contributing as much as they can to the company's success. Engaging our people, involving them fully in our planning and development is an essential part of how we live by our values.
Our approach starts with the belief that employees are engaged one by one, as individuals with different needs, talents, capabilities and aspirations. We want everyone to reach their potential, fostering a great environment in which to work. Highly engaged teams in Diageo deliver superior commercial results.
We have a good understanding about what drives engagement - helped by the valuable feedback gathered through our annual values survey. This knowledge is particularly important to us now, given the level of change our business is currently going through.
We know we can drive engagement, and great results, in Diageo by inspiring our people with a compelling strategy for the future, recognising and valuing their individual contribution, acting on their feedback, giving them opportunities to grow and develop and behaving with integrity, including demonstrating our commitment to sustainability and responsibility. Diageo people are very passionate about our brands, consumers and customers, and we want everyone in the business to be knowledgeable ambassadors for our brands. We stage regular 'brand passion' events in our business units, and focus on brands, customers and consumers in our internal communications.
Measuring engagement: the values survey
The annual values survey is our most important measure of how well we are living the values. Through the survey, we also gather feedback on many aspects of people's experience of working at Diageo, from career development to work/life balance. The survey allows us to track progress, team by team. We can then review our plans and decide where we need to take action.
2011 Value Survey Results1
| | % of favourable responses | movement from 2010 |
| Passionate about customers and consumers |
84%
|
+1%
|
79%
|
79% |
83%
|
+2% |
73%
|
= |
72%
|
= |
85%
|
= |
67%
|
= |
73%
|
= |
39%
|
-2% |
1Values survey is administered by Kenexa, one of the world's largest employee survey providers.
This year our response rate was broadly stable at 89%, compared with 90% in 2010.
Overall the results were in line with last year, and we are proud of this high response rate which is among the best compared to leading companies.
Key areas of improvement were that more employees believe this year that Diageo is ‘passionate about customers and consumers’ and more employees said they were ‘proud of what we do’ including our sustainability and responsibility programmes. The survey also highlighted opportunities for improvement. For example, we know we can simplify what we do and the way we do it, and clarify accountability. The steps we are taking as a result of the Operating Model Review should help us improve our scores in future years.
An important measure for us is 'super engagement', which is an extremely exacting measure of the extent to which employees understand and believe in the company's goals and values, are proud of Diageo, and whether they will stay with, and recommend, Diageo. Our aspirational goal for 2011 was to achieve 50% super-engaged across Diageo. We saw very strong performances in many parts of the business this year, but overall our score dropped back somewhat from 41% in 2010 to 39% in 2011. However, 24 teams of 50 or more in our business did achieve 50% super-engaged in 2011 - so there is much to be proud of. We are examining how best to address this in the coming year.
Engagement on sustainability and responsibility issues
We know that our work to engage employees also helps to leverage the impact the company has on sustainability and responsibility issues, given that many of our programmes rely on employee participation for their success.
To understand how employees feel about our sustainable impact, we include three questions in the values survey directly linked to our sustainability and responsibility strategy. They are:
- Leadership in the responsible drinking agenda: this year 91% thought Diageo was effective in promoting responsible drinking, compared with 90% last year
- Contribution to local communities: in line with last year, 82% thought that Diageo makes a good contribution to our local communities
- Contribution to environmental sustainability: this question was asked for the first time this year, and 84% of employees agreed that we are environmentally responsible.
Raising awareness
We are working to raise employees’ awareness of and engagement with sustainability and responsibility issues. A great example is through our company-wide GREENiQ programme. By signing up to GREENiQ, employees can become environmental champions for their site, and join an online network with a forum and news portal.
We also hold a global competition to find the most sustainable Diageo sites, giving regions, sites and individuals the chance to win £15,000 to spend on an environmental improvement programme of their choice. The programme has proved both popular and effective, as shown by a recent survey by Yale students.