Streamlining health, safety and wellbeing processes, as well as giving managers the flexibility to adapt approaches for their own local areas, have all helped beauty giant L’Oréal navigate the challenges of Covid-19. But, as Malcolm Staves outlines, this was the fruit of an approach that had been planted some years previously.
Before the outbreak of Covid-19, and the monumental test of resilience it brought to organisations worldwide, the world of work was engaged in a debate about simplification.
There are many issues hotly debated in business, but the need to simplify the way we work was, is, certainly one of them.
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Back in 2015, professional services network Deloitte published an article Simplification of Work: the coming revolution. Simplification, said its author Burt Rea, was one response to employees being completely overwhelmed by increasing organisational complexity, information overload and a 24/7, always-on work environment.
Rea highlighted a survey by Deloitte, which had found that more than seven out of 10 surveyed organisations rated the need to simplify work as an “important problem”, with more than a quarter citing it as “very important”.
Today, simplification is considered a cornerstone of business resilience and has been a factor in helping the “resilients” weather the Covid crisis. Indeed, management consultancy firm McKinsey says “organisation simplification” has become part of what it terms an emerging “resilience playbook”.
In occupational health and safety, we see evidence that forward-thinking leaders laid the groundwork for more resilient workplaces pre pandemic by simplifying health, safety and wellbeing policies and procedures.
Recasting ‘VUCA’
In the UK in 2015, Crossrail, for example, introduced a four cornerstone model (healthy company, fitness for work, health risk management and wellbeing) “to simplify the provision of occupational health, helping leaders and managers throughout the business to articulate the overarching model for improved health and wellbeing”.
And in Paris at around the same time, we at cosmetics and beauty giant L’Oréal embarked on a drive towards simplification in workplace safety, health and wellbeing that today has been accredited for helping us through the crisis. This, in more detail, is our story.
Several years before the Covid-19 outbreak, our Paris-headquartered business decided it should be better prepared to operate in a ‘VUCA’ (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) world, which was increasingly connected and subject to shocks and ever-changing markets.
To become more agile and resilient, we embarked on a simplification and effectiveness drive to transform the company. We recognised we needed to be more agile and resilient in this ever-evolving world, it thought, to deliver the group’s goals. And so the ‘Simplicity programme’ was created, “to lay the groundwork for flexibility and lasting growth by training adaptable, efficient teams within a frame”.
In occupational health and safety, we see evidence that forward-thinking leaders laid the groundwork for more resilient workplaces pre pandemic by simplifying health, safety and wellbeing policies and procedures.”
As part of this programme, our health and safety team recast VUCA in a positive form. Instead of seeing change and uncertainty as a threat, we remade the acronym so that it now stood for ‘Vision, Understanding, Clarity and Ambition’. This reframing as part of its communications was to guide the development of the health and safety culture to the next level.
A sense of why
The next task was to set about decluttering and giving a ‘sense of why’ to the safety, health and wellbeing policies and procedures already in place to protect what is a large, disparate workforce.
Understandably, for a company of L’Oréal’s size and complexity, we were faced with a raft of documents that explained incident prevention and an extensive occupational health remit, including ergonomics, mental health, chemical risk evaluation and noise controls.
We therefore set about introducing pared-down documentation that clearly and simply spelled out the overall strategy and the tools to deliver it. We also began clarifying the messaging for senior managers and their teams.
In this streamlining process, we considered the system developed with the support of 19 divisional safety and health directors, under the frame banner ‘Risk assessment, excellence and beyond’.
It was a title that encapsulated the company’s continuing evolutionary path from essential risk control, through excellent health and safety practice, to employee engagement and ownership of safety, health and wellbeing in a mature, effective, high-performing health and safety culture.
The ‘excellence and beyond’ system had been 10 years in the making. Layer upon layer had been added to the existing systems and processes and consequently they had become overly complicated. So, we introduced eight pillars as a way to describe it in a much clearer, simplified way, including risk management, safety culture, training, expertise and leading indicators/KPIs.
The pillars ranged from foundation elements of a system, such as strategy and objectives, through the cultural and behavioural aspects affecting day-to-day work, such as visible leadership and employee engagement, and on to system verification in reporting and audits.
We wanted to show people on one page and in simple terms an overview of the system. One that would make sense to senior management as well as give meaning to employees of ‘why’ safety, health and wellbeing was important to them. We changed the conversation.
Be selective
Simplification, therefore, was step one, laying the groundwork for greater agility in health and safety management at L’Oréal, and organisational resilience. Step two, however, was the key to the success of our programme.
The reason the ‘excellence and beyond’ rollout worked was the flexibility of the programmes and their selective implementation. We identified selectivity as a key ingredient to success. In other words, that it is about using the right tool at the right time, and adapting those tools wherever necessary.”
We gave clear direction to our EHS (environment, health and safety) directors across the different territories, allowing them to adapt their approach based on the safety, health and wellbeing maturity of each site. They were given the freedom to decide which of the tools and methods to choose from the toolbox and when, depending on their site’s culture maturity.
These tools, for example, included ‘Ergonomic Attitude’, a health prevention and wellbeing programme for all L’Oréal activities, where ‘every employee is an active participant in their own health’. This was then enhanced by introducing a basic screening tool to identify the risks and potential solutions. If the activity was complex then a more complete tool was still required, for example.
On top of this, we embedded ergonomics in our sites, investing in training people to understand ergonomics at all levels, including OSH professionals, managers, and all other employees.
To my mind, in this new and uncertain world, it’s quite simple – it’s about trying to simplify. There can be so many things that sites are having to manage that EHS directors can struggle with the quantity of programmes and initiatives, and the effectiveness of implementation suffered.
In this new and uncertain world, it’s quite simple – it’s about trying to simplify. There can be so many things that sites are having to manage that environment, health and safety directors can struggle with the quantity of programmes and initiatives, and the effectiveness of implementation suffered
For example, one simplification initiative was all about freeing more time so that our OSH professionals could spend more time on the shop floor doing practical, hands-on heath and safety.
Prepared for the shock
So, what about Covid-19? To an extent, even though we didn’t know it at the time through the simplification programme we were preparing ourselves for the shock of Covid.
The VUCA approach (the good acronym of it, at least), the focus on simplicity, giving people a frame in which to work, giving people the right tools at right time, all of that was vitally important.
Allowing test and learn and selectivity also helped us to maintain operations in the early months of 2020 and, for example, pivot towards producing and donating millions of bottles of hand sanitiser and other vital suppliers to the front lines.
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Obviously, the pandemic is not yet over and there will probably be more, and new, challenges still to come. But I am proud to work for a company that puts people in the centre and believes that health, safety and wellbeing is a core value.
We really want to do the right thing for our employees and go beyond our gates and make a difference to our families and wider communities.
