DHL Express, the world’s leading international express service provider, has been named the Best Workplace in Asia for 2019 by Great Place to Work Institute. To learn the secrets of this journey, the 3rd meeting of the Indo-German HR Partner Forum was held on 14th August 2019 at DHL Express (India) Office. The discussion theme for the day was “Building and Sustaining a Great Place to Work: DHL’s Journey”.
Representatives of the following partner companies attended the meeting: Baerlocher India Additives, BASF Group, Bayer Group, Bosch Limited, Brose India Automotive System, Covestro India, Fuchs Lubricants, Häfele India, Kärcher Cleaning Systems, Knorr-Bremse Technology Centre India, Lanxess India, MAN Truck & Bus India, Schaeffler India, Siemens Ltd, TUV India, Volkswagen India, Wacker Metroark Chemicals.
All dressed in bright yellow, the young, vibrant DHL HR Team welcomed the HR Partners warmly to their pride, their Great Place to Work. The hosts of the day were R. S. Subramanian, Senior Vice President and Country Manager and Sunjoy Dhaawan, Vice-President HR, DHL Express Limited. It was a pleasure that Bernhard Steinruecke also chose to attend the meeting and spend the day networking with the HR Partners.
R. S. Subramanian opened the day with an extremely engaging presentation on DHL Express. DPDHL Group has about 550,000 employees in more than 220 countries and territories worldwide, DHL connects people and businesses securely and reliably, enabling global trade flows. They have created a culture which prioritizes hard work, passion, pride and focuses entirely on the customer. They aspire to be the most global, most quality driven and most customer centric organization. To meet this objective, their strategy for year 2020 is based on 3 key pointers:
- Focus on what has made them successful to achieve industry leading performance.
- Connect across organization to achieve quality and service excellence.
- Grow by finding and capturing new opportunities.
‘First Choice’ is how DHL imbibes the practice of Continuous Improvement. They have imbibed a culture and mindset to address challenges, solve issues sustainably and strive for excellence. More than 170,000 employees engage in Performance Dialogs. It is a community of 36,000 trained experts, experienced in the methodologies and established with a proven set of tools and techniques to help each other to improve on a daily basis. They have 29,000 process improvements to their credit.
Hand-in-hand with process improvements, comes responsibility to their employees, to society and the environment. This strong sense of responsibility has a major influence on the way they conduct business and is the foundation of their corporate culture. They aim a target of zero carbon emission in 20 years. They plan to achieve this by the following 3 steps:
- Go Green – The program’s main objective is to reduce and/or avoid emissions of greenhouse gases and local air pollutants
- Go Teach – The program aims at turning society’s attention to improve future opportunities of young people by employability training
- Go Help – Partnership with the United Nations in Disaster Management Response Teams
It is truly credible that they have touched 15500+ children, planted 50000+ trees, rehabilitated 500 drug users, trained 300 youth, saved 220+ lives through first aid and trained 3000 police personnel in crisis management.
After a short networking break, Sunjoy Dhaawan engaged the HR partners with the DHL Journey over the last 6 years of creating and sustaining a Great Place To Work and how people practices have contributed as a chief enabler in ensuring motivated people delivering great service quality, which ensures customer loyalty and profitability. The openness with which the entire HR Team shared their best practices, initiatives and numbers was indeed very encouraging and inspires trust in the forum members. It was also very engaging to note the DHL 1-2-3-4-5 Story around culture building. The culture at DHL Express is driven by strong respect for employees, customers and community. This forms the core reason for the existence of the company and the practices followed.
- One signifies that employees stand as As One, which makes them ‘The Logistics Company for the World’
- Two signifies the 2 guiding principles of ‘Respect’ & ‘Results’
- Three signifies the quest to deliver on 3 bottom lines for key stakeholders – provider of choice for their customers, employer of choice for their people, and investment of choice for shareholders, while being responsible to the environment
- Four signifies the 4 pillars of the FOCUS Strategy – motivated people, great service quality, loyal customers, and profitable network, denoting the virtuous cycle of engaged employees, quality focus through processes, customer loyalty and strong business performance
- Five signifies the 5 core competency framework that defines and measures people leaders
Undoubtedly, the magic mantra at DHL is Speed, Can Do Attitude, Right First Time and Passion. They are a strong believer of the quotient P = GQ, which means people deliver growth and quality.
After lunch, the HR partners were addressed by the Director – Customer Service on the Insanely Customer Centric Approach. He enlightened the audience on how team DHL ensures future success by creating a culture that is truly focusing at placing the customer at the center of everything they do. His statement “we don’t carry shipments, we carry emotions”, struck a chord with every partner.
The HR partners were then given a tour of the Customer Service Floor and taken to different HR Kiosks to give an impression of why DHL is one of the best workplaces. Through the diverse DHL HR Kiosk, they learnt about DHL’s Internal Awards, WeCare Programmes, Employee Health and Wellbeing Initiatives, Talent Acquisition, Reward and Recognition, CIS Learning and Development, Employee Engagement, Diversity and Inclusion. It was also very inspiring to see the digitalization journey in HR for DHL Express as they have been able to digitalize the entire employee lifecycle experience through which they engage the heart and minds of 3200 employees spread across 50+ offices in India.
As a fitting conclusion, Bernhard Steinruecke gave DHL a new meaning to their acronym – Dedication, Human and Legacy, and the HR partners could not help but remain in awe to this giant logistics service provider. What a wonderful learning experience at a Great Place to Work!
