Background
With an ever-expanding global presence and a diverse workforce, digital products, platforms and services business UST, which has more than 34,000 employees across 30 countries, faced the challenge of sustaining engagement. It also sought to align organisational growth with employee personal growth and promote collaboration across different generations and cultures. And in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic UST needed to facilitate a smooth transition back to the office while ensuring equal engagement and empowerment for all employees, regardless of their start dates.
Approach
Not content with reinventing the wheel, UST decided to sustain, strengthen and scale up its existing in-house Colors framework. This two-decade-old framework, known as Colors of UST, has become an integral part of the company’s organisational culture, firmly rooted in its core values of humility, humanity and integrity. Each Color represents a specific purpose. For example, Color Rose stands for community relations, Purple for people, Quartz for quality and speed, Indigo for innovation, Orange for digital organisation, Gold for global branding and green for growth.
The framework connects associates across the globe, fostering a sense of purpose and belongingness as well as achieving corporate goals through participative management and employee empowerment. With this foundation in place UST set out to address its key challenges through the below mentioned four-pronged approach:
1. To keep up with rapid growth it embraced a ‘glocal’ approach that combined a global framework, while empowering each function and geography with full autonomy to run initiatives suitable for them.
2. Aligning organisational growth with employee personal growth, it introduced the Colors Growth Engine. Every UST associate can choose to be part of one or more Colors based on their personal interests, which allows them to drive initiatives related to their passion areas while contributing to the overall goals of the organisation.
3. By employing a purpose-driven bottom-up approach UST accomplished intra- and inter-generational as well as intra- and inter-national collaboration. This innovative strategy tapped into the intrinsic motivation of UST’s diverse workforce and allowed each Color team to bring their unique perspectives to driving change. Notably, the framework provided equal opportunities for every employee to make a meaningful impact, irrespective of their position or background.
4. Addressing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic UST focused on making the transition back to the office vibrant and engaging for its employees. The company’s Workplace Vibes initiatives energised the workplace by organising a wide range of engagement events. UST partnered with the Values and Culture team to assist employees in smoothly transitioning to a hybrid work mode, with value partners ensuring support through buddying. These efforts helped bring 100% of the workforce back to the office at least three days a week, fostering a ‘one-team’ mindset while maintaining consistent levels of engagement and empowerment.
Traditional leadership roles are replaced by servant leadership, giving every employee the freedom to innovate and contribute ideas that are supported by the organisation.
Outcome
UST has experienced consistent revenue growth and profitability, achieved Great Place to Work certification and won numerous Brandon Hall Group awards for excellence in human capital management. Overall, UST was able to contribute approximately 25,000+ volunteering hours across 9 geographies. Additionally, this engaging framework impacted the communities through various CSR projects, by touching 200,000+ lives across the world, including skill-placed training and job placements. And, importantly, this approach has helped it achieve great results with its customers,. Out of the many benefits, there was a $30 million projected per year saving for a US managed healthcare company whose business problem was given over to bright minds within UST as part of the Color Indigo’s internal hackathon event.