Operational efficiency International case study
Upskilling and
‘human digitisation’
Staff at Henkel identified what skills were needed to take each job
family forward on the organisation’s journey to digitisation, and paths
were created for managers and blue collar workers. By PETER CRUSH
The organisation
Düsseldorf-headquartered international
chemical and consumer goods company
Henkel is a multi-billion-euro behemoth,
founded in 1876 by scientist Fritz Henkel. Its
first product was the Universalwaschmittel –
a universal detergent based on silicate – and
since then the business has divided into three
distinct units (laundry and home care, beauty
care, and adhesive technologies). Henkel is the
maker of familiar household brands including
Persil, Schwarzkopf, Sellotape, Pritt, Right
Guard and Loctite. Its more than 53,000
employees work in 120 countries worldwide,
and although the business has been publicly
listed since 1985 Henkel remains a majority
(60%) family-owned business.
The challenge
Manufacturing and heavily R&D-based
organisations live and die through innovation.
So to stay ahead of its rivals – the likes of
Unilever, P&G and Johnson & Johnson – it’s
vital Henkel employees continually upskill
and develop, says Lucas Kohlmann, Henkel’s
global head of strategy, leadership, talent
management and diversity and inclusion.
Since 2017 Henkel has been on a business
digitisation journey, but this has only
magnified its skills needs further, as Kohlmann
explains: “HR’s own digitisation process
created a clear need for developing what we
call ‘human digitisation’ – how we upskill our
own hugely diverse employees – everyone
from blue collar, to senior managers and
board executives.”
The strategy
Recognising the differences in its employee
population, Kohlmann decided to divide skills
development into two tiers – a ‘digital base-fit’
for blue-collar staff and an ‘expert-fit’ for
managers and above.
The former comprises gamified and quizbased
learning modules in a whole raft of new
areas – from AI to robotics and even bitcoin.
“The aim was to increase people’s basic digital
knowledge in a fun way,” he says.
For its expert-fit learning (aimed at a
population of 10,000 managers globally)
Henkel partnered with Accenture to create
more bespoke learning, across 10 different job
families including HR and IT. Working groups
were created, asking managers from each
family to identify exactly what skills they felt
were needed to take the organisation forward
(some seven to eight key capabilities needing
developing were identified for HR alone).
Henkel’s workforce is hugely diverse, so it was necessary “What was quite brave of people,” says
Kohlmann “was that managers then assessed
themselves against the skills they felt their
function needed, to identify their own
personal skill gaps.”
Assessments were piloted first among
marketers in 2018, but the success of it paved
the way for the rest of the job families to
undertake their own assessments during 2019.
Skills paths are now being created that provide
an average of 20 hours’ worth of learning over
three months across the job families. So far five
of the 10 job families (marketing, IT, purchasing,
HR and corporate communications) have had
training fully rolled out – with 1,800 people in
marketing alone undergoing learning.
While basic learning is voluntary and
expert-level learning is not exactly mandatory,
Kohlmann says people are “expected” to take
it. He explains: “Creating the working groups
was probably the most intense part of the
process,” he recalls, “because some needed
convincing of the need to do this – especially if
it revealed gaps in their own learning – but
over time scepticism dwindled.”
The result
Early results have been impressive – with more
than 100,000 hours of digital learning having
been completed already (YTD November
2019), and participation in expert-level
training extremely high (92% among the
marketing job family).
Henkel staff are now in control of their own
development and careers, and digital learning
48 HR February 2020 hrmagazine.co.uk
/hrmagazine.co.uk