Encouraging innovation, and increasing productivity
Unilever is one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies, with over 172,000 employees in more than 170 countries. Over 3.4 billion people use its products every day.
Winning Together is Unilever’s global campaign to help free its people from complexity and bureaucracy, so they can innovate, make swift and bold decisions, look for opportunities and take intelligent risks. As part of the programme, we were commissioned to develop and deliver a global campaign to help engage employees to champion simpler ways of working, with practical changes to daily activities that would free up time, effort and resource, and help build a better, more future-focused business.
Our approach was to create a campaign centred on the sharing of simple, proven tips that could be put into place with minimal effort, and immediate yield. We called it ‘Time Saving Ideas’. At its centre was a reward-based mechanism to stimulate employee participation and contribution of ideas.
Colleagues from across the business provided their own ideas for ways to increase workplace efficiency, including on themes of best-practice for efficient meetings, or use of digital communications in the workplace.
We also produced an activation toolkit to help Unilever managers to enable a smooth and consistent roll out of the campaign locally and beyond. This included top tips for campaign success, a core campaign narrative and messaging to help set the tone for colleagues, and vibrant campaign visual assets. The campaign had immediate impact; after just one month, more than 2,500 Unilever employees were actively participating. Following on from Time Saving Ideas, we helped Unilever to create a framework to simplify communications with employees on all the issues that matter to them and the business.
Outcomes
2,500
After only a month, more than 2,500 employees were taking part in Time Saving Ideas.
10,000
At the end of the programme 10,000 ideas had been shared and rated by colleagues worldwide.
90%
Time Saving Ideas contributed to 9 in 10 employees being aware of Unilever’s approach to agile working.
30%
The campaign also contributed towards a 30% reduction in unnecessary travel costs.
“Our work with Unilever on Time Saving Ideas provides a great reminder of the power of colleague-generated ideas in engaging a whole workplace in collaborative and collective action.”
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