Coor cares about people because people are their main asset

For over 20 years, Coor has managed and developed service functions in offices, production facilities and properties. Their focus on people faces both outwards to customers and inwards to employees, with the performance of their 11,000 employees vital to their success.

Coor considers having a high-motivation employee index as a key driver for the entire organisation rather than something exclusively of value to HR. Employee performance and engagement are both essential to the business’s overall success, making HR a key part of organisational strategy.

“We work with people matters,” says Anders Asplund, Senior Vice President of HR, “which is something that’s of interest and value to our entire company. We don’t have a product and we don’t conduct research, so it’s the people who are our most important assets. We’re a people-to-people business.”

Engaged employees means satisfied customers

Coor is well aware of the correlation between motivated and engaged employees and satisfied customers. This means the company’s most important People KPIs are focused on employee motivation, leadership, safety and engagement.

“I believe the human factor has a great impact on most companies,” says Asplund. “The key to success is to be able to integrate HR and people matters with the bigger business context. For HR to get attention from other parts of an organisation, HR people must be interested in learning the business values, and we must be able to show how we can contribute to the bottom line.”

Digital tools are the key to efficiency

The digitalisation of performance management  at Coor has had a significantly positive effect on the three identified key focus areas: Potential, Performance, and Succession.

“We started 20 years ago with seven people and today we are 11,000 and growing,” says Caroline Pettersson, Head of People Performance. “That means we need to be as cost-efficient and effective as we can, which simply isn’t possible without digital tools. Culture and communication go hand in hand, and because of the nature of our business, we are dependent on good channels for transparency and communication.”

Since many of Coor’s employees don’t sit in a physical office or work at a computer all day, they use mobile devices to stay in touch. To enable efficient and transparent communication, Coor developed its own mobile app. This app is used throughout the organisation for distributing corporate messaging, for online chat between employees, and for general communication.

Digitalising performance management

In 2016, Coor implemented CatalystOne’s SaaS cloud solution to handle performance management alongside other systems and solutions in different countries. Using this tool, Coor’s managers are measured by the same criteria throughout the entire organisation.

“It’s vital for us to know how to grow while maintaining our core values, culture and being cost-efficient,” says Pettersson. “By having the information regarding our resources digitalised, it becomes easy to find, analyse and use data. This then creates a basis for decision making and strategic corporate development.”

By digitalising leadership evaluation in particular, HR and executive management have access to documentation and can track progression over time. They are able to see the effects of various leadership improvement initiatives and other valuable data that they can follow and act on strategically.

“Our HR department – and the company in general – is now digital to a good extent. We can see the benefits of expanding our use of digital tools and aspire to do so,” says Asplund. “However, you need some patience; it takes time. More HR focus does not automatically mean more business value, better culture, or better outcomes. It’s all about HR’s focus and how well we manage to take a leading role in connecting HR work to other areas, like IT, finance and bottom-line results.”