Our culture is changing & we want to shout about it

Interview with Karen Duhart, Corporate Responsibility Project Manager, Total Quality & Corporate Responsibility

In 2006 we launched an ambitious program to tell all our employees about how our company culture is evolving from Total Quality Management (TQM) to Sustainable Excellence, in order to embrace and respond to the wider expectations of our stakeholders. Here Karen Duhart, Corporate Responsibility Project Manager, brings us up to date with progress.

This program, the Corporate Responsibility Awareness training, was our first global e-learning course, and seeks to explain:

• what Corporate Responsibility is
• why it is important
• how employees can contribute, and
• how our leadership in this area is evolving.

It also introduces our new code of conduct, the Principles for Sustainable Excellence, which serves as our company’s reference framework for responsible business practice.

Designing and deploying the Corporate Responsibility Awareness program

Being so large in scope (our objective is to reach all 50,000 employees by the end of 2007), and also a new experience for ST in e-learning, the Awareness program took a whole year to put together, and months to plan the launch.

We set up a dedicated project management team at corporate level, which included members of different departments and functions, such as the CR Department, ST University, Information Technology and Human Resources.

We carried out the whole project, from content to delivery, using internal resources. In addition to this, we set up a companywide network of regional and local people, including Sustainable Excellence champions and committees, to make things happen on the ground.

Key success factors and challenges
The program has been a real success so far, and we can attribute that to several factors, namely:

• Top management commitment: the year before the e-learning program, the Total Quality & Corporate Responsibility Vice President and the Corporate Responsibility Director conducted a world-wide site tour, to introduce the subject, and get commitment from local management
• ST University: our internal university played a key role by helping prepare the final content of the course, and in introducing our new e-learning platform in record time
• Communication campaign: this included a range of different media such as posters, video, presentations, a world-wide kick off meeting and constant coaching to local champions
• Deployment scheme: we used certain locations as pilot sites, to build and transfer knowledge between sites quickly and efficiently. Each site was also fully responsible for deploying their own program, and therefore able to adapt to local needs easily.

Of course, no program is without its challenges. And the Corporate Responsibility Awareness program was no exception. The main challenges included having to:

• find an effective way of communicating the same message to all 50,000 employees (from top managers to clean room operators)
• find solutions to the many technical and logistical challenges
• find practical ways to engage with managers, encourage them to take ownership and drive the ‘appropriation’ process
• address real dilemmas and perceptions of discrepancies between our values and our actions, and encourage people to take an innovative, problem-solving approach.

A closer look at how things worked locally
Of course, we could only do so much centrally to make this program happen - we also needed involvement at a site level, which is where the Sustainable Excellence steering committees came in. Each site set up a dedicated core team, made up of their training manager, communication manager, IT department, Human Resources department, and Sustainable Excellence site coordinator. They each designed a strong action plan, building on other sites’ experiences, and integrating a specific approach to local needs. Common elements of these action plans included strong communication, manager involvement and collective introduction and feedback sessions.

So what did employees think of it?
It was important for us to find out employees’ perceptions of the program. So we included anonymous open and closed questions in the course. Preliminary results show that employees appreciated the new interactive media and the content of the training. In particular they valued the concrete commitment of the company to CR, and the focus on how they as individuals can contribute.