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Our purpose statement – Empowering you to move forward – applies just as much to our colleagues as it does to our suppliers, customers and the communities we are part of. We want to cultivate a culture of feedback, so we can address the concerns, desires and needs of our most important asset – our people - in time and react accordingly. Having an engaged, competent and dedicated team of people is crucial to everything we do – and everything we plan to do. HR Content and Employee Experience (EX) Specialist Wanda Stoteler, talks with Operations Director France Aurélie Mattmann about how new EX initiatives are helping this happen.
“We gather employee feedback in various ways, but the KWEE is the large-scale, quantitative system of measurement,” Wanda says. “It asks questions about employee satisfaction, working conditions, how supported by their managers people feel, how well equipped they feel to perform their jobs, what they are proud of, what can Kramp improve and whether they would recommend Kramp as an employer…”
“Historically, we issued the KWEE every two years. From September 2021, we changed the frequency to twice a year – February and September. We also introduced new listening activities during the onboarding stage, to hear new employees’ thoughts after their first month, and an exit survey for leavers. At the end of 2021 we introduced a further channel for employee feedback: every business department and manager can conduct a short survey of their team – a pulse check-in – asking four or five specific questions on a relevant topic. All feedback streams are anonymised so no data is traced back to particular participants.”
“We also wanted a clearer picture of the emotional drivers for an employee,” Wanda says. “The Employee Journey, introduced in summer 2021, is a qualitative initiative, with a series of interviews to identify unconscious needs, emotional experiences, what people value most. We made a careful selection of employee demographics for a fair representation of colleagues of different ages, genders, lengths of service, seniority, type of work and location, and conducted interviews.
“The results show a lot of pride in our shared success. The downside of our rapid growth is that it has caused some insecurity and there are challenges keeping up with technology adoption. Working closely with colleagues is one of the strongest drivers of engagement.
We have discovered that our employees really value learning & development opportunities, that management style is vital to employee satisfaction and that there is some inconsistency between managers in how they stimulate teams. Empathy and engagement are clearly important, and the Kramp leadership training program will have a part to play in improving this, but with so many variables in everything from pay rates to management style, it is a complex area to analyse and address. We can see, though, that we should work on making reward and opportunity more transparent.
Listen to the podcast where Wanda explains how we go from insights to impact.
Listen to the podcast where Reinout reveals what he likes the most of working at Kramp.
