Isabelle Minneci has helped cosmetics giant L’Oréal make its HR as innovative as its R&D – and it’s paying off
Unless you spent 2012 in a cave, you couldn’t have missed the debut of BB cream on British shores. It was the biggest beauty sensation in years: a “wonder cream” to “cut your morning beauty routine in half,” screamed Cosmopolitan, praising the way it reduced the appearance of blemishes and gave tired complexions a dewy glow.
As chemists across Britain braced themselves for the arrival of hordes of miracle-hungry shoppers, L’Oréal – the largest cosmetics company in the world – was racing to be first to market with its Nude Magique BB brand. And that meant unleashing the French-owned firm’s full innovative might, not only in product development but right across the organisation.
The cream was discovered in Asia, then developed for the British market at laboratories in Paris, explains Isabelle Minneci, HR director at L’Oréal UK. But it was London-based promotional teams, including marketers, beauty technicians and salon consultants, she says, that helped make it such a winner with consumers.
Minneci says her 38-strong HR department’s role is pivotal to unleashing and “animating” the talent that creates such bankable products. “We believe that the success of L’Oréal comes from its people, so the HR function is at the core of our strategy,” she says. “Our motto is: ‘We want to be number one in beauty, but also in growth.’”
Her people-centric strategy seems to be playing its part. It helped produce a 5.5 per cent rise in like-for-like sales in 2012, following similar growth in 2011. “We are very fortunate to be in a market that’s growing – partly because there is an eternal quest for beauty,” says Minneci, who has been with the business for more than a decade. “Even in economically tough times, people always need something for their own pleasure. We are constantly focusing on consumer insights and needs.”
Minneci says one of the key challenges for her team is to “constantly develop the skills of our organisation”. To ensure HR is close enough to its employees to identify where support, training and strategic development are needed, its structure resembles a multi-armed sub-continental goddess with manicured fingers reaching into every part of the business. There is an HR lead for each British division (professional, consumer, luxury and pharmaceutical products) and heads of HR for four regional distribution centres, as well as a group-wide corporate HR function located in London.
But Minneci says this multi-faceted structure doesn’t slow the march of change – locating HR close to the talent means it can nurture people throughout their careers by “knowing them well”. But what does delivering those principles actually mean?
Get closer
“To ensure that the HR function is at the core of the business strategy, you need proximity and to know your employees. In some companies you have one HR person for 1,000 employees. For us, the average ratio is 1:200 or 1:300 max,” says Minneci. This enables HR to understand employee needs. “Then you can see the best way to develop people and truly work on their career progression.”
This proximity helped Minneci spot skills gaps as the company geared up to embed more digital capability across the business. Although L’Oréal’s marketers were already highly skilled in digital communications and technology, she says, this wasn’t the case in every function. “Digital is important everywhere. If I take HR as an example, we have more and more social media activity in our recruitment strategy,” she says. To ensure staff could be developed, HR dedicated 15 per cent of its training budget to digital.
The effectiveness of this approach is evident in staff retention. For example, over a quarter of senior managers in the consumer division started out as graduates at the business.
Connect your staff
Siloed working is not conducive to innovation or collaborative working. At L’Oréal the staff dots are joined through regular team and company meetings, communications around “career week” and other initiatives or emails highlighting job-swap opportunities. “The point is to get people talking and experiencing different parts of the organisation,” says Minneci. “We also offer staff the chance to shadow members of the management team. L’Oréal is such a big organisation that you can be working in your brand and not see what the rest of the business is doing. So we are constantly talking about our brands and our results.”
Members of HR from different parts of the business also meet up and talk regularly to share ideas and experiences.
Engage your ears
“Listening to what our staff think is key to making them feel valued as well as gleaning new ideas for more efficient ways of working,” Minneci says. HR partners with the communications team to ensure that employees know which initiatives are being put in place for their benefit. The business holds regular mini-polls, which take the form of an employee meeting where they vote anonymously in real time on questions on a big screen (a little like the audience voting system on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?).
“Our employees love it because they feel it is much more transparent. We are not hiding anything and we are seeing the successes but also the more challenging results,” she says. Such feedback has also led to a current project to amalgamate the HR systems staff use, so they only have to login once to access key information.
Be responsive
For innovation to thrive and remain part of the culture, it must be clear that suggestions and feedback don’t just disappear into the ether.
It’s important for people to know HR has acted on their suggestions, Minneci says, so areas that staff identify as needing improvement are designated as “change management programmes” for HR. “We constantly measure our progress on these areas and relay it back to employees.” When a staff survey found that people felt managers were “not close enough to their employees”, HR developed a programme to boost management skills. It led to improved employee survey scores in the area. In its most recent poll, L’Oréal scored above its peers in the sector and above the UK national norm for management scores, specifically when it came to the statement “my direct manager encourages new ideas and new ways of doing things”.
Recruit early and often
“For us, the war for talent is ongoing. It’s about getting the next generation of employees. Because we are a growing business, we have a constant need for new recruits,” Minneci says.
When you are promoting people from within the business, you’re constantly needing to fill roles, she says. This opens up more generic jobs within the organisation, which are perfect for graduates. The employer has 34 graduates and 100 interns in the business at all times. This pipeline of fresh talent underpins L’Oréal’s ability to renew its innovative culture. “For us, it’s an opportunity to detect talent. Seventy per cent of graduates come from internship programmes. We can recruit them before they have finished their degree. We work very much in advance in terms of talent recruitment.”