Unilever’s HR boss on stitching the world of work back together

When Leena Nair told her father about her plan to switch from elec­tron­ics and tele­coms engi­neer­ing to human resources, he made no attempt to hide his dis­ap­point­ment. “Who the hell cares about human resources?” he asked.

Fast for­ward near­ly three decades and 51-year-old Nair has her answer: mil­lions of us care, if not bil­lions. The effects of the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic, lay­ered with the impact of dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion, have turned the world of work upside down and it is HR pro­fes­sion­als like Nair who are tasked with stitch­ing it back togeth­er.

Helping staff thrive

Despite the huge uncer­tain­ties ahead – Nair isn’t even sure when she’ll return to the office – Unilever’s Lon­don-based chief human resources offi­cer remains remark­ably upbeat. The company’s mar­ket dom­i­nance def­i­nite­ly helps. Unilever’s port­fo­lio of glob­al house­hold brands – think Per­sil, Domestos, Hellmann’s, Dove and PG Tips, to name but a few – has shield­ed it from the worst of the pandemic’s woes.

The stride in Nair’s step also owes to Unilever’s new cor­po­rate strat­e­gy. Unveiled last May, the ten-year plan com­mits the Anglo-Dutch con­sumer goods giant to a three-pronged “pur­pose”, one of which is help­ing its 155,000 employ­ees “thrive”.

Talk of thriv­ing runs counter to the gen­er­al sense of doom hang­ing over the future of work. After four years in the top job, Nair knows the spiel as well as any­one: “robots tak­ing over your job”, “only data mat­ters”, “your liveli­hood is going”, as she her­self puts it.

Where she dif­fers is her aver­sion to pes­simism. Her phi­los­o­phy in a nut­shell: “You don’t have to have change done to you; you can embrace the change and feel in con­trol of your own sto­ry.”

It’s not just idle chat­ter either. In late-Jan­u­ary, Unilever unveiled a slew of work-relat­ed com­mit­ments aimed at mak­ing good such talk. The list includes a pledge to skill up its entire work­force, pio­neer new employ­ment mod­els and pro­vide skills train­ing for ten mil­lion young peo­ple world­wide. 

Com­ment­ing on the tar­gets, Nair observes that big busi­ness remains decid­ed­ly qui­et about its social role, espe­cial­ly when com­pared to the buzz around the green agen­da. A rebal­anc­ing is need­ed. She says: “I’m real­ly hop­ing that the social side also has its Gre­ta Thun­berg moment.”

Purpose: pushing the P‑word

Most pro­jec­tions for glob­al employ­ment are pret­ty bleak, so is Nair’s upbeat opti­mism mis­placed? Pos­si­bly. But she believes Unilever’s focus on pur­pose will be impor­tant to attract­ing and retain­ing top tal­ent.

Nair is by no means the first to trum­pet the P‑word and its virtues. Busi­ness­es nowa­days are trip­ping over them­selves to breathe pur­pose into who they are and what they do. Yet the cur­rent buzz­word has no more vocal fan than this one-time engi­neer.

Her zeal derives, in part, from her ear­li­er point about change. As she elab­o­rates: “If you work in the areas that you are ful­ly pas­sion­ate and pur­pose­ful about, you feel more in con­trol of the change that’s hap­pen­ing to you.”

Rare among enthu­si­asts, Nair also has a pro­found­ly prag­mat­ic streak. Leav­ing peo­ple to stum­ble on their pur­pose is, she judges, ill-advised. Nat­u­ral­ly, she has her own pur­pose nailed – “ignit­ing the human spark” – but she knows most of us are hap­py just to mud­dle through.

To that end, Unilever is rolling out work­shops across its glob­al oper­a­tions to help employ­ees pin­point their per­son­al pur­pose and map out a plan for deliv­er­ing it. The inten­tion is to cov­er every­one on the company’s pay­roll over the next four years, from the C‑suite to the fac­to­ry floor.

If it sounds all very hip­py-dip­py, then Nair has hard num­bers to sug­gest oth­er­wise. More than nine in ten (92 per cent) of work­shop par­tic­i­pants, for exam­ple, say they now expend greater “dis­cre­tionary effort” at work and are less like­ly to jump ship.

Lay­er this on top of Unilever’s strong sense of cor­po­rate pur­pose, name­ly “to make sus­tain­able liv­ing com­mon­place”, and you have a pow­er­ful mix. Enough, at any rate, to make it the top employ­er of choice in 54 of the 75 mar­kets where it oper­ates.

“In truth, I don’t have to work very hard at attract­ing peo­ple to Unilever because they believe this is a force-for-good com­pa­ny,” says Nair.

Skilling up: battling the robots

Pur­pose is all well and good, but it won’t stop you los­ing your job to a robot. This salient truth is not lost on Nair, who returns to Unilever’s pledge to upskill its entire work­force by 2025.

Much of this train­ing will be offered online. The company’s own elearn­ing plat­form has in excess of two mil­lion curat­ed cours­es cov­er­ing “every sub­ject under the sun”. Under a recent­ly intro­duced flex­i­ble-work­ing scheme, employ­ees also have the option to take career breaks for fur­ther study.

Inter­est­ing­ly, Unilever’s “future-fit” vision for the world of work extends beyond its own imme­di­ate ranks. With­out a major skills upgrade, Nair argues, a huge cohort of tomorrow’s work­force face exclu­sion from our ever­more dig­i­talised econ­o­my.

Benev­o­lent as such actions may be, there’s also a hard-edged log­ic to them. Ten mil­lion well-paid work­ers equals ten mil­lion more con­sumers who are ready and able to buy a mul­ti­pack of Sig­nal tooth­paste, say, or a tub of Wall’s ice cream.   

The same twin rea­sons under­lie Unilever’s recent call for a glob­al liv­ing wage, which it expects all its sup­pli­ers to be pay­ing by 2030 at the lat­est. For its part, Nair says Unilever is com­mit­ted to spend­ing €2 bil­lion a year on firms owned by women and oth­er diverse sup­pli­ers to sup­port bet­ter-paid work for all.

Like so many com­pa­nies, Unilever finds itself in the curi­ous posi­tion of using dig­i­tal tech to resolve prob­lems of digitalisation’s own mak­ing. Its youth train­ing pledge, for instance, will be met in large part through a web plat­form packed with webi­na­rs, elearn­ing cours­es and links to intern­ships.

Flexibility with security

So what kind of work­ing pat­terns await the swathes of pur­pose-dri­ven, upskilled work­ers Nair hopes soon to have in her employ? 

One thing is for sure, they won’t be head­ing into the office for five days a week, 52 weeks a year. Work­ing from home may be start­ing to wear thin, but that doesn’t mean office work­ers want a com­plete return to the way things were.

Again, the dis­rup­tions of COVID-19 are serv­ing to accel­er­ate pre-exist­ing trends, says Nair: “COVID has shown us that we have to rein­vent the way we work; every sin­gle one of us has yearned to break some of the tra­di­tion­al norms.”

Unilever’s pack­age of solu­tions goes a step beyond the usu­al flexi-work arrange­ment of a day or two at home. It’s not just the shape of the work­ing week that’s up for grabs – Unilever’s oper­a­tions in New Zealand are pilot­ing a four-day week, for instance – but con­tract mod­els are also in line for an over­haul.

Take its Flex plat­form. Pitched as an “inter­nal mar­ket­place” for short-term projects, the ser­vice alerts employ­ees to tem­po­rary tasks across the busi­ness. Nair imag­ined uptake might hit 2,000 place­ments a year; cur­rent num­bers are run­ning at five times that fig­ure. 

More rad­i­cal is U‑Work, a recent­ly intro­duced mod­el that allows employ­ees and con­trac­tors to work on a retain­er basis. Unilever guar­an­tees between six weeks and six months work a year, with the remain­ing time left to the indi­vid­ual to fill as they please.

Nair is quick to rebut the com­par­i­son to gig-econ­o­my con­tracts, insist­ing that pay­ment terms and ben­e­fits are pro­por­tion­al­ly equiv­a­lent to those of full-time work­ers.

“In all the options we are cre­at­ing, we are com­bin­ing flex­i­bil­i­ty with secu­ri­ty, so peo­ple are able to bal­ance their life and work in a way that’s mean­ing­ful to them,” she says.

Flex­i­bil­i­ty, secu­ri­ty, bal­ance, mean­ing: think you don’t care about human resources, then think again.