DHL EXPRESS

DPDHL know that employees are their biggest asset and value the ideas, skills and experience of each individual. This comes with a huge responsibility for continual development – not only delivering opportunities for employee growth, but maintaining a highly performing business.

After a successful adoption of a new leadership framework to managers and leaders, DPDHL recognised that many of the attribute qualities also apply to the wider employee population. So after emerging from a challenging period during the pandemic, they made a decision – DPDHL were going to overhaul their performance management process with a new framework that measured employees on how they well they demonstrated leadership behaviours in their roles.

This was a fundamental change – performance management impacted every employee of the business, many of whom were time-limited by operational or frontline responsibilities. It was critical that employees were guided through the transition through authentic and relevant examples, so they could embrace the new ways of working.

Unquestionably communications needed a strong identity in order to gain attention, be meaningful, and easy to recall given the time constraints of operational employees.  But more importantly, a strong and thorough phased strategy needed to support employees in building an understanding of Head, Heart and Guts behaviours through authentic, real life examples.

Managers needed to be equipped with tools to help employees reflect on their own behaviours and start to form new habits. And given the challenges around limited opportunity for formal training, we needed to encourage discussion and bring Leadership Attributes into the day-to-day conversation in order to facilitate continual learning. Communications needed to reach all corners of the global workforce to ensure employees truly understood the impact on their role.

The change communications were rolled out to the entire workforce of over half a million employees and company-wide adoption has made the attributes common culture. Respecting employee expertise, the new attributes encouraged new ways of working, empowering their personal development and decision-making in their roles.