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Unleashing the Best in Our People
Bringing to life our commitment to become the world’s most trusted mobility company requires us to change the way we work, transform our culture and unleash the best in our people.
Transforming Our Culture and the Way We Work
The automotive industry is changing rapidly. Technological innovation, changing customer expectations and a world that is increasingly crowded and urbanized are all driving change at a scale and rate that are without precedent.
Our response is to transform Ford into an auto and mobility company, designing smart vehicles for a smart world that help people move more safely, confidently and freely. Making this fundamental change means drawing on our trusted 114-year legacy, our love and passion for freedom of movement, and our ambition for the future. It requires us to transform our culture, bringing forward the best of our past, and paving new ways of working. In addition, it means putting people first – leveraging human-centered design in everything we do, including our people processes, so that we bring out the best in our workforce.
Putting People First Through Human-Centered Design
In 2016, we launched a new program called HRRev to transform our people-related products and services in a way that significantly improves the employee experience. This includes leveraging leading technology, simplified and integrated processes, and consumer-grade service centers to support employee inquiries and moments that matter.
Our “People First” service center promise to our employees is simple...
We bring expertise and consistency
We make it simple for you
We listen and care about you
We respect confidentiality and act with integrity
We have taken a human-centered design approach to drive our cultural transformation. Over 7,000 hourly and salaried employees across the globe have provided input into this through focus groups, prototype testing, observations, experiments, surveys and polling.
Our employees identified the moments that matter most such as onboarding, policy changes, a key life event (for example, the birth of a child), new job transition and giving and receiving feedback. They told us they want:
- Simple, intuitive, integrated experiences
- Anytime, anywhere, any-device access
- Choice in how they interact with us, including online, telephony, chat and email
- To be able to provide point-in-time feedback
In October 2018, we will be launching a global, next-generation “Life@Ford” portal and three new “People First” service centers to support our global workforce. This will include online, fully mobile policies, processes and programs and will enable employees to connect via telephony, chat or email with People First professionals when they need help. It will also include newly engineered processes like the “Partnership Discussion,” which is an informal, future-focused conversation on growth, development, goal setting and the employee/supervisor relationship. With these changes, we hope to empower and enable our workforce to be the best they can be.
Employee Engagement and Satisfaction
Communicating With Our People
With so many employees globally, effective, two-way communication is key to our success. To achieve this, we use a range of communication channels, including our Intranet site, website and Jim Hackett’s video blog; 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 (see below).
Assessing Employee Satisfaction
Through our annual Global Pulse Survey, we encourage our employees to provide honest feedback about their jobs, workplace and overall satisfaction with Ford. Results feed into reports that are used to inform discussions and improvements plans, aimed at positive trends – an annual performance objective for many senior managers. The survey results are also benchmarked externally, so we can better understand how we are performing in a wider context. In 2017, our Employee Satisfaction Index score was 72 percent, 2 percent above the external benchmark. Our Employee Engagement score was 84 percent (no external benchmark is available for this).
