Making Employees’ Lives Better

Changing the Way We Work

The automotive industry is rapidly evolving and the magnitude of change is unprecedented, due to factors such as rapid technological innovation, changing customer expectations, and an increasingly crowded and urbanized world.

Our response is to transform into an automotive and mobility company, a fundamental change that means transforming our people strategy too. So in 2016, our global HR organization embarked on a multi-year journey to transform how we work.

This program, called HRRev, seeks to use next-generation technology to streamline our people processes, making them simpler, more efficient and more meaningful to all who work at Ford.

A fundamental aspect of the program, driven from the top by our former President and CEO Mark Fields and our Group Vice President of Human Resources and Corporate Services Felicia Fields, is a shift in emphasis to improve the experience of our employees at work. It’s a streamlined, employee-centric approach that aims to empower our people through collaboration and integration.

HRRev People Shifts

This more innovative mind-set is demonstrated in a range of “people shifts” as outlined below. We have identified four key areas where we believe we have a significant impact on our employees’ experience, and are starting to develop processes and guidelines that are designed to increase emphasis on areas that need more attention.

Shifting the Emphasis of Our People Principles

In support of this change in mind-set, we are transforming how we work across the company to drive business results. This includes how we:

• Attract, retain and develop talent through a more personalized employee experience
• Use the latest technology to improve processes, increase usability and accessibility, and provide analytics and insights to inform decision making
• Free up capacity and expertise to support high-value strategic business needs
• Leverage centralized Shared Service Centers to provide greater consistency and quality, achieve economies of scale and make us more responsive to the ever-changing business environment

The People Lab

To fully understand and address the challenge of transforming our processes, a group of HR leaders joined forces to benchmark and gather data from inside and outside the company. Based on their findings, we created a People Lab: seven HR employees from all regions and levels of the organization. The team’s task was to deeply understand employee feedback, explore best-in-industry practices and find ways to simplify and streamline our processes.

Rather than using pilot studies, their work involved devising experiments to address issues such as pay for performance and supervisor feedback. These were designed to follow a scientific method, involving hypothesis setting, testing and measuring results against expected outcomes, enabling us to get deeper insight into the user experience, observe behavior and scientifically test interventions to guide process design.

Employee Engagement and Satisfaction

Communicating With Our People

We use a range of channels to communicate with employees with different experience and interests in timely and efficient ways. These include: our intranet site and website; annual reports and corporate publications; social media channels; webcasts and executive Q&A sessions with senior management; labor-management committee meetings; “Town Hall” meetings; Employee Resource Group (ERG) initiatives; and employee surveys.

Assessing Employee Satisfaction

Each year, we conduct our Global Pulse Survey, through which our people are encouraged to provide honest feedback about their satisfaction with the company, their jobs and their workplace.

Managers and supervisors are given a report highlighting how their teams and/or plants responded to the Pulse Survey. These are intended to inform discussions and improvement plans, contributing to a steady increase in Pulse scores, an annual performance objective for many senior managers. The results are also benchmarked externally.