Social responsibility 2019

The role of HR is to drive, support and develop the organization’s capabilities, ensuring that Nordic Morning Group has the right people in the right roles with the right competencies to be able to do a great job. The company strategy is the starting point in building the desired capabilities, talent, leadership and culture.

2019

Business transformation, building growth and developing a growth mindset continued to be the dominant themes for Nordic Morning Group in 2019. Restructuring operations, building the new organizational setup and helping employees adapt to the changes required strong support from the Group Management Team together with the HR function.

Significant efforts were also made to develop a dynamic, collaborative and results-driven organizational culture where everyone can perform at their best. The long-term target for this work is to enhance self-leadership on all levels.

Building competencies that reflect our Guiding Principles has been the core of our culture work in 2019, with feedback behavior as the main theme throughout the year. We learned how to give and receive feedback in a constructive and sustainable way. We succeeded in increasing the amount of feedback in the organization, such as by encouraging systematic After Action Reviews in internal meetings and client work.

In workshops provided to all employees, we learned how the human mindset influences our behavior and how we can become aware of our own mindset to make a difference. A growth mindset helps us regard feedback as an opportunity to learn and develop.

As part of the ongoing change journey, we conducted an in-depth engagement survey among our employees in spring 2019. As engaged employees are known to drive high performance and growth, employee enthusiasm was selected as an important perspective in the study. With a response rate of 69 percent, the survey gave us valuable insights and highlighted the key drivers for what to focus on in our ongoing transformation. The aim is to continuously improve employee enthusiasm in Nordic Morning Group.

We have already benefitted from the survey results in our internal development work in 2019. We have placed particular focus on the following areas: internal collaboration, utilization of customer feedback (in developing our ways of working), individual role and goal clarity, as well as increased support and direction for each employee’s professional development.

In our Leader’s Roundtable gatherings, we have provided managers with a forum for learning, information sharing and collegial support, which is working very well. The development areas identified in the Our Voice engagement survey were a regular feature of our autumn agenda. In particular, our performance development framework with quarterly team leader-employee discussions were an important topic in these gatherings throughout the year.

In order to reinforce the cultural change journey, we have created pedagogical and user-friendly material for current and future employees that describes our culture: where we come from, where we want to go and the shared tools that will get us there. At the same time, we have further developed our onboarding practices to ensure that newly recruited employees are properly introduced to the desired culture.

2020

To further support the desired cultural change and to drive accountability and self-leadership, we will continue to strengthen our coaching and feedback skills across the whole organization over the coming year. Developing these competencies is highly relevant for everyone, and especially crucial for leaders, who are expected to be role models in the desired behaviors and to use them effectively both in daily interactions as well as in quarterly discussions.

We will also continue to work with our performance development framework in order to improve the employees’ role and goal clarity and to promote behaviors that support a growth culture and mindset.

By working purposefully with talent management and talent acquisition, we plan to strengthen our talent pipeline and ensure we have strong candidates for key positions in the future. More effort will also be placed on systematic development of the identified people.

The progress of our culture change journey and identified employee enthusiasm drivers will be measured with a light pulse survey in the spring and a more thorough engagement survey in the autumn. With these follow-up mechanisms, we want to ensure that we are on track and that we are taking the right actions to develop our culture in the desired direction.