Development and Engagement

Reinforcing our talent pool

Sourcing, attracting, developing and retaining the best talent is vital to support ST’s business strategy.

Increasing our employer attractiveness

Delivering the best employee experience is crucial for us to attract and retain the best people.

In 2019, we introduced more attractive employer branding and defined a new staffing strategy to reinforce ST’s external image. We also implemented new digital solutions to speed up our recruitment process.

We enhanced our compensation and benefits policy and we continued to promote a differentiated and transparent approach to remuneration and rewards.

To deliver a great onboarding experience to newcomers, we improved our induction process by sharing and spreading our current best practices.

We also continued the initiatives we launched in 2018 to modernize our processes and transform our workplace from an employee experience perspective. One example is the ‘Paris.Augmented’ program at our Paris site (France), in which employees worked together to create a better workplace that encourages greater well-being, creativity, collaboration and fulfilment.

Coaching at ST

FOCUS

Coaching helps employees give the best of themselves

Coaching is one of our people development priorities. During a thought-provoking nine-month process, ST coaches help employees to maximize their personal and professional potential by asking powerful questions, opening up new angles, and confronting issues with compassion to enable people to find their own solutions. This process facilitates change and improves engagement and pride. It also spreads a feedback culture and supports the whole Company in acting together as a learning organization.

“In a fast-changing environment, it is important to coach people to develop their self-awareness, boost their autonomy, increase their assertiveness, reveal their courage and intensify cooperation. This helps the participant to explore new ideas, manage their energy and balance career opportunities,” says Marie-Sophie Note, Head of the Coaching Office at ST.

Developing and supporting our people at every stage

Feedback is a fundamental pillar of our culture. It helps us strengthen and continuously develop our talent pool to address future business challenges.

Since 2018, we have strengthened our people management process with collective and individual assessments. Our objective is to improve self-awareness and better prepare people to fulfil their potential with us, through structured career paths and customized development plans. These assessments are now an integral part of the promotion process for senior managers and up-and-coming talent identified through our people review as key position successors. They are also integrated into our longstanding talent-development ‘booster’ program.

Embedded in our managerial culture, coaching is also a powerful tool to support the career development of our people.

To reinforce the quality and consistency of our coaching program, we created a coaching committee in 2019 comprising 12 managers and representatives from human resources. The committee oversees and shapes the coaching strategy, vets coaches, ensures good governance, and measures the business impact (see Focus).

Leadership skills for all

During 2019, we focused on instilling leadership skills at every level of the company to ensure a consistent global culture. By the end of the year, nearly 1,500 people had participated in our ‘Leadership Augmented’ program, with modules covering topics such as strategy and innovation, change management, leadership and Lean.

As announced in 2018, we also introduced two new modules:

• Communicative leaders – to develop managers’ communication skills, improve engagement and better connect employees with ST’s vision
• Managing personal energy – to strengthen people’s ability to manage pressure in order to reduce any potential socio-psychological risks

We received very positive feedback from participants on both modules (see quote).

Martina Giuffrida

Technical Marketing Senior Engineer, ADG Catania (Italy)

We are all constantly confronted with ever-increasing, challenging demands inside and outside the workplace. To preserve high engagement, performance, focus and creativity, we need new and concrete tools, because time is a finite resource. The ‘Manage your Energy’ training program I attended this year helped me to develop my own strategies to deal with this.”

Getting the best from all our people

Getting the most from our people is essential to help us anticipate evolving customer needs and meet new market demands.

Enabling a high level of engagement

Employee engagement is a critical driver of organizational performance as we seek to achieve our business objectives. I 103-1 I

We carried out a new employee survey in 2019 focusing on individual engagement, goal alignment, and organizational agility. The 90% participation rate was the highest in ST’s history and all results showed an increase of at least two points over the 2018 survey. I 103-2 I

The overall engagement index stood at 79%, two points higher than 2018 and 10 points above the global industry norm⁽¹⁾.

77% of employees recommend ST as a great place to work, two points up on 2018.

84% of employees are willing to put in extra effort to help ST meet its goals, which is nine points above the global industry norm⁽¹⁾. I 103-3 I

This improvement reflects the actions we have implemented over the past three years in areas such as leadership skills, quality, Lean and feedback culture, strategic alignment, talent recognition and differentiation.

Capitalizing on our Lean experience

In 2019, we continued our program – begun in 2008 – of introducing Lean practices to streamline process flows, break silos and improve agility throughout the Company.

Already in place in our Greater Noida (India) and Rousset (France) sites, we extended our site-based Lean communities to other sites including Tours (France), Catania (Italy), Singapore and Muar (Malaysia).

The aim is to create Lean communities at all our main sites by the end of 2020. Composed of Lean Champions (the experts) and Lean Ambassadors (the supporters and influencers) from different on-site organizations, these Lean communities help us to tackle common issues efficiently, as well as making it easier to share experiences, ideas and practices.

We have defined a specific development path for Lean Champions based on three types of assessment: job observation, behavioral assessment, and self and managerial evaluation of lean activities, enabling us to create personalized, high-quality development plans.

Contributing to the Sustainable Development Goals

Our commitments and programs as described above contribute to:

SDG target 4.3 – Ensure equal access for all women and men to affordable and quality technical vocational and tertiary education, including university.

⁽¹⁾ CultureiQ manufacturing industrial equipment/instruments norm.