Bolstering Employee Engagement

Mar Romero has more than 15 years of experience in HR, Operations and Cultural Transformation in large multinationals. Within a strategic approach to people management, Mar's goal is to recruit, retain, and develop the best talent, always aligned with the company's culture and values, to achieve business results. Also, to implement new ways of working, offering the best employee experience. Previously, Mar worked in management positions in companies such as Adecco Group, Burger King, and Deloitte, taking responsibility for the HR strategy, implementing new organizational models, executing training and development plans.

When leading the people to function in a worldwide delivery company, there are big and fast[1]changing challenges to consider. Grupo Telepizza has a presence in 39 countries, with over 45,000 employees, which demands technology as a primary ally to manage all people processes along the way, from hire to retire. It is true that technology is not the final purpose on its own, but without it, we would be left out of the success path. Our teams need technology to achieve better performance, and our customers demand technology to ensure we are prepared to achieve our goals, adapt our methods, and predict the unpredictable.

The purpose of our company is to “bring moments of joy” and this not only applies to the customer but to the main stakeholder: the employees, our teams. This translates to a global company that wants its people to work in an empowering culture where they can and shall participate, learn and grow, all while enjoying, growing, inventing, trying, playing, and achieving bigger or different responsibilities.

Our two main focuses are people and business. First, regarding people, the labor market has quite changed, so we knew we had to reposition our brand to attract all new profiles. As far as the business goes, our company has had an exponential growth–not only in figures but also in a geographical expansion–and People must lead the way.

We cannot be the worldwide pizza delivery leader without having a winning team. So, we stopped thinking about a digital transformation and started talking and applying a digital revolution, that needs to be transversal and focused on a cultural turnaround: designing new ways of working, to be organized, with more horizontal structures, in order to be more agile and above all, having smart working policies, and even further, happier and more efficient ways of working.

To provide a recent example, in the current COVID-19 context we corroborated that our management style for the past years has been appropriate: thanks to the building of a strong culture in Grupo Telepizza, as well as having been through a management change we have faced this big and non-precedented challenge successfully

In past years, not only it was a right decision to revolutionize the look & feel of our employment sites, but it has also been a priority to digitalize and innovate the work methodologies, the recruiting and selections processes, to bring to the company’s day to day the platforms and skills that the natives of technology live in, entertain themselves with and most importantly, the usual tools they use in their day-to-day (to communicate, to buy, to expose their talent, to find friends, etc.) are part of how we communicate with them, identify them, make an offer and finally, hire them.

Although the employer branding and employee experience is a huge part of this, we have also investigated ways to innovate and automate the end-to-end experience. This applies, of course, to the culture but also the recruitment factor. In one sentence, with our old process, we needed to receive 2M resumes to hire around 100K employees, now we have increased the efficiency of the process by 70 percent. Can you imagine the impact of this? Not only in economic and timing terms but also because the candidate experience has gone through a 360-degree turnaround.

Considering the global situation, the world is facing right now, I would also like to mention the way technology has allowed us to succeed in a confined situation. It has been quite a challenge for everyone, but our previous preparation and the awareness we had of the importance of conciliation between the professional and personal ambits, allowed us to enter this difficult times with the knowledge and the platforms necessary so that our people can be working effectively from home and still have a feeling of closeness and teamwork. This is taking our purpose to a new level.

It is time to be brave!