16 Vodafone Group Plc Annual Report 2024
Strategic report
Governance
Financials
Other information
Our people strategy (continued)
4. Engage and retain diverse talent, and unlock potential through focused succession and people development Our Group Chief Executive and Chief Human Resources Officer conducted a series of Succession and Talent Acceleration Review (‘STARs’) meetings with the market and functional CEOs and HR Directors during the year. These meetings discussed the Senior Leadership Team (‘SLT’) succession plan for employees identified as key talent. Those in the ExCo succession and talent acceleration pool, which includes 44% women, receive one-to-one support, including leadership assessment, development planning, and coaching. To strengthen our market or functional CEO succession pipeline, we have also established a programme to support 15 senior leaders who have the potential to become a CEO in the next three to five years obtain the skills, experience, and exposure required. To increase our understanding of employees identified as key talent across the rest of the business, 167 senior leaders at senior management level completed leadership development assessments to help inform talent decisions. They also attended development planning sessions to grow their impact and prepare for future roles. Leadership development Leadership is essential to enabling transformation, and we continually invest in developing inclusive leaders who drive growth and innovation, act as role models, coach and empower teams, and lead with Spirit. Programmes delivered this year include: – ‘Vodafone Leader Labs’, attended by our top 182 ExCo and SLT leaders to enable the leadership shifts required to deliver our strategy; – ‘Leading for Customer Loyalty’, attended by leaders to deepen their connection with customers and shape a customer-centric culture; and – ‘CEO Accelerator Lab’, attended by 11 market CEOs to support their transition as newly appointed CEOs. This included assessments, one-to-one coaching, leadership training and business mentoring. To complement these programmes, leaders also use coaching and assessment tools digitally and on-the-go. Digital and personalised experience Office space The shift to hybrid working has redefined the role of the office and inspired us to create a new global office design primarily for collaboration and connection. We have improved the digital workplace experience with new booking systems for desks and collaboration spaces, access control, video conferencing and presentation facilities. Last year we opened an innovation campus in Málaga in collaboration with the University of Málaga; we refurbished a listed building to update it to the newest technology. Employees work there with university students, fostering greater opportunities to collaborate on innovations. This is a great example of the hybrid workplace improving employees’ experience and attracting talent. We continued to enable remote working through our ‘Office in a Box’ initiative, which was implemented to support employees’ wellbeing while working from home. This provides a virtual office set-up at home following a self-assessment. Digital experience We remain focussed on digitally transforming the people experience and evolving ways of working to accelerate the execution of the people strategy and deliver simplicity, efficiency and an enhanced experience across people processes. This has been driven by global initiatives across the people life cycle.
The award-winning Artificial Intelligence (‘AI’) enabled Grow with Vodafone platform continued to create hiring efficiencies and optimise the recruiter, hiring manager and candidate experience, enabling: – Increased diversity through tailoring job recommendations for candidates and removing bias through anonymous candidate recommendations; – Improved recruiter efficiency through simplified navigation between tools and candidate recommendations based on required skills. This resulted in a reduction in time-to-hire from 50 days to 48 days; and – A simplified and faster application process through personalised skills-based job recommendations and a 78% reduction in questions. This resulted in 78% of applications moving to submission stage. To attract, retain and support diverse talent more consistently, this year a new global talent acquisition policy was launched and our onboarding tool was also enhanced with new features to provide a simpler and more personalised experience for new joiners, driving engagement. This is enabled by automated and tailored notifications, including the use of SMS in the UK, which has led to a journey effectiveness score of 87%. A key priority for Vodafone is having a clear and robust strategic workforce-planning process. As a result, we implemented a simple and secure global headcount planning tool to improve accuracy, reduce manual time and effort, and enable closer collaboration between those involved in the process. The tool is available in majority of markets and Group functions 1 , allowing users access to gain experience with the new system. To improve the speed and effectiveness of HR admin support for employee queries and transactions, our HR chatbot has been scaled and is now adopted across Vodacom, _VOIS India, the UK, Group UK, Romania, and _VOIS Romania. The chatbot receives 67% of queries across all channels, with an average first-time resolution of 53% and an employee Net Promoter Score of 75. We are closely following AI and Generative AI advancements in the market and, based on pilot findings, we are working with multiple external experts to harness the potential for integration with HR processes. The top four use cases selected include: automating query resolution; driving deeper people data insights; enhancing learning and talent acquisition content and removing bias; using AI-enabled search and recommendations to find the best candidates, as well as learning content and career opportunities for employees. We are enhancing the people data analytics team’s capability with the implementation of a global HR data lake using Google Cloud Platform. This is now live for all markets except Germany and enables standardised insights and dashboards, reducing the need for manual reporting. This is supported by high-quality people data managed through a data quality tool, which checks and corrects HR data against pre-set rules, with 100% error resolution since its launch in FY23. To complement the changes in the digital ecosystem, we have continued to invest in our ways of working. We introduced a global service model for the hiring of employees at executive management level (SLT and senior managers), which has led to a more standardised and efficient process. We are also transforming the HR business partnering support model in an agreed set of markets to improve its effectiveness. HR business partners will focus on strategic activities, while transactional HR activities will transfer to _VOIS. To optimise HR services, we continue to re-locate activities conducted in markets (including selected learning and development tasks and resourcing admin tasks) to _VOIS. This will improve service quality at scale while creating savings of €0.6 million. A transformation plan was also executed to ensure _VOIS readiness to receive the activity in preparation for the future service offering. Note: 1. The headcount planning tool is available for: Albania, DRC, Egypt, Greece, Group Commercial, Group Corporate Functions, Group Technology, Lesotho, Portugal, Romania, South Africa, Tanzania, Turkey, and the UK.
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