TELENOR FOCUSES ON CONTINUOUS CHANGE | Front Leadership

As one of the world's largest mobile operators, Telenor has over 20,000 employees across nine different markets in the Nordic region and Asia. Chief People Officer, Cecilie Blydt Heuch, has extensive experience in HR from DNV GL, Norsk Hydro and Yara, among others. Now she shares her experiences with Leadership Weekly and explains how Telenor works with HR to achieve the company's overall goals.

What is your top priority for HR going forward and how will you tackle this?

The business strategy lays the foundation for the development of a "People strategy" that will help drive the company forward. This consists of four main points that we work from every single day:

1. Modernization of the organizationThispoint is about structure and digital tools. Telenor is becoming increasingly digital and the transition from physical to digital is ongoing in many parts of the organization. We are looking to see if there is anything we can do to become more efficient through automation, restructuring in relation to our own knowledge, assessing whether we should perform tasks ourselves or let others do them, and a number of other efficiency measures. Through structural simplification, we will ensure better utilization of existing resources and create room for new opportunities.
2. Facilitating customer-focused work Here, there is a strong focus on being data-driven. We are conducting a survey of how employees feel at Telenor in terms of everything from employee induction to performance reviews and exit processes, and it's important to find out where the potential for improvement lies. It's also about being agile and customer-focused in the way we work, for example by enabling us to "turn around" more quickly in relation to customer needs.
3. Organizing the skills shiftThe skills shiftis a major focus for us. In 2017, we launched "The 40 hour challenge", where all employees from top to bottom must complete 40 hours of e-learning every year. It is set up as an online campus where learning solutions are curated for different roles, functions and technologies. These different modules are something all employees have equal access to, and have been very well received and supported by the unions. There is a lot of uncertainty about how relevant the knowledge you have will be tomorrow. The world is changing, roles are constantly being changed or automated away. This is an opportunity for employees to stay relevant and has been very important for their satisfaction and engagement. Alongside this, we also have physical leadership development and courses, so all in all, a good mix of approaches.
4. Culture development in line with company valuesWehave four different behaviors we recruit, develop and assess people against. These are "keeping promises", "create together", "always explore" and "be respectful". Underneath this is diversity and inclusion, which covers everything from gender balance to a broad agenda in terms of competence, gender, nationality, age and sexual orientation, to name but a few. To achieve this, we have targets in each of the four main areas. Last year, for example, we conducted our first in-depth salary analysis that looked at the differences between women and men. It was interesting to see the structures and find out why it was this way or that way. Some differences were also difficult to explain, and we had to decide how to deal with them. Because we have a presence in so many different countries with different legislation, we work actively with non-discrimination in the workplace.

What are your main ambitions for development at your company?

A lot of work is done on developing the organization and ways of working, but we also have development plans that focus on the individual employee. Here we talk about adding new knowledge and developing existing knowledge. How we can organize ourselves and work in new ways is very important for us to be competitive, and the development and renewal of knowledge is perhaps the most important value we have.

What have you done to further develop your own skills?

In Telenor's group management, we all need either a coach or a mentor, so I regularly use a coach to work on my own leadership. I'm also part of a "reverse mentoring" scheme where I mentor a younger person in communications, and she does the same for me in her field. In this way, I develop my communication skills while receiving input from someone who is younger and has a different perspective than myself. Of course, I also have my own "40 hour challenge" that I complete. There's no point in challenging 20,000 people without doing it myself, so it's important that I deliver. Through this challenge, I do exactly the same as everyone else. I'm also part of an external HR network where I get sparring partners who work with similar challenges as me. Apart from all this, I have been very conscious of getting to know the whole of Telenor's business. Instead of just sitting at the head office and meeting with HR people, I'm out and about meeting employees in different positions. By talking to everyone from salespeople in rural Bangladesh to IT staff in Sweden, I gain valuable insight into Telenor as an employer and what we can improve.

Who impresses you and why?

I must say I am incredibly impressed with the employees of Telenor around the world, especially in the last few months of new everyday life. They have mobilized and really taken the challenge head on for the society they are part of now during the corona pandemic. Many have had major challenges, we should not hide that. In Bangladesh, for example, there have been storms and monsoons, but despite this, they have managed to keep their networks up and running. At the same time, most support functions have been moved to the employees' homes because home office has been the only option for most people. In Denmark, they moved their call centers to 24-hour home offices and maintained quality and customer satisfaction. This transition has created a lot of pride internally. It has been extremely meaningful to work during this period, because by ensuring that people can still communicate, we have helped to keep communities up and running.

Despite the fact that the challenges have been great, we have learned lessons that we are taking forward. At times, for example, the meeting culture has become significantly more efficient, the number of meetings has been reduced or conducted in a different way. We will continue to think about how we involve and connect with each other, for example when we work with teams from different countries.