The European Leg of The ChapmanCG Global HR Leaders Meetings Series Ends with Roundtables in Milan and Stockholm

The European Leg of The Chapman Consulting Group’s Global Series of HR Leaders Meetings have come to an end in style, firstly with our South Europe group meeting at Pirelli in Milan, Italy, and finally with our Scandinavia group meeting at Electrolux in Stockholm, Sweden. Attendees at these small groups included Global HR decision-makers from companies such as Autogrill, Benetton, Campari, Ermenegildo Zegna, Indesit, Intesa Sanpaolo, Parmalat, Maersk, ASSA ABLOY, AstraZeneca, Danfoss, Ericsson, Husqvarna and Stora Enso, to name just a few.

In order to preserve the anonymity of the information shared from these sessions, we will not be reporting on all the findings discussed. However below is a short summary of some of the most interesting points raised:

1. One Italian manufacturing company has put together a very elaborate plan of individual career paths for its employee base in growth markets. The main driver for this was because the company wanted to move away from employees viewing compensation as the ‘be all and end all’ of attraction and retention, and had chosen to differentiate themselves from the market by offering a high degree of career development instead. This is done by offering a series of domestic and international projects, stretch assignments and job rotations.
2. An Italian fashion brand has elected to include their Chinese business leader in China in overall global management meetings. This structural change has had a very positive knock-on effect in forcing the Executive Committee to ‘think global’ in their decision-making at the HQ level, and has also forced them to speak only English in these meetings.This was a great example of how structural design can fast-forward the development of a company’s global corporate culture.
3. One Italian consumer goods company shared experiences of their successful entry into the Russia market. While the company was very successful in growing its business in Russia and achieving very high quality in manufacturing, there were significant problems in handling senior management, particularly in transparency of decision making at the senior level. These have been fixed through an ongoing process of checks and balances. But more broadly, the company has made the strategic decision to focus their energies on looking after the majority 90% of the workforce rather than spend too much on the top 10% of talent. This shift in focus away from the ‘high flyers’ and towards the foundational ‘backbone’ of the company has helped to engender a great culture of community and teamwork in the organisation from bottom-up.
4. Meanwhile in Sweden, one of the key themes of the Scandinavia group of Global HR Leaders was: Simplicity. Many Global HR Leaders in the room agreed that there is still too much focus on HR as a process-oriented function rather than as a business integrator. However on the flip-side of this argument, it’s often a highly developed HR operational system running in the background that allows HR to simplify its offering to business stakeholders. The key take-away was in the communication strategy: When speaking with the business, don’t overcomplicate things with the detail of HR operational strategy, and distill things into their most clear and penetrable applications.