Nestlé: “The pandemic forced us to go fast”

Gregory Pilano, head of HR technology (Zone North America) at Nestlé

By getting feedback regularly about HR services, Nestlé strives to “have a comprehensive, holistic assessment of the services provided by HR, the technology enabling those services, and obviously the organization”. 

When approaching Nestlé’s HR transformation that saw the company implementing a program that positively impacted more than 260,000 employees in 109 countries Pilano shares that “there were big objectives, but the key one, was to simplify our ways of working, so we could standardize them and standardize our technology stack”. 

Pilano unpacks that this means making HR practices and solutions easy to understand and making these as common as possible across the many regions that Nestlé operates in.   

In doing so, the company unlocked cost efficiencies and can now operate at greater speed.

The “transformation program spun multiple years. And a lot of events happened. COVID-19 was one.” 

Pilano expands: “the goal was to constantly check what was going on, where the needs were, and how we could adjust what we were delivering, zone by zone, market by market, to address the actual needs of the businesses and their employees.” 

Thinking on this, Pilano adds: “We had big objectives in mind (simplify and standardize), but we kept iterating as we deployed that transformation program.”

Keeping the employees at the center

Many organizations found the COVID-19 pandemic the greatest challenge of recent years. 

Pilano gives insight into how Nestlé and its HR practices helped in this radical change in the working world: “We took a lot of initiative at the very beginning [of the COVID-19 outbreak] to take care of our employees, especially our frontline employees.

“The company put a lot of emphasis on reassuring our frontline employees, expanding benefits while reinforcing safety protocols”. 

With office workers moving to working from home, Nestlé replaced Skype with Microsoft Teams globally in a matter of weeks. Reflecting on this Pilano says: “This was pretty unprecedented at Nestlé, but the pandemic forced us to go fast.  

“We had Microsoft Teams deployed everywhere on every computer very quickly. So, office workers were able to continue working like ‘normal’.  

Considering how Nestlé managed this, Pilano comments: “We really took care of the people, I think that’s the key thing in this organization. Nestlé is a company that prides itself on being a people company, and I think that showed during those times.” 

Over the course of the pandemic, the need to drive and accelerate digital transformation in different ways led the company to implement a new digital adoption platform.  

This helped as “we then had to continue the implementation of our major HR transformation program with teams being fully distributed and virtual, as we could not meet physically. We turned to digital adoption platform, to help with change management.  

“Instead of teaching people the new ways of working and how to use the new technology with traditional training, we’ve used a virtual assistant, which makes things easier for everybody”, shares Pilano.

Pilano notes that a virtual assistant is helping people learn how to use new tools with minimal strain and effort on the organization, at scale.  

Moving forward

Although, Nestlé has successfully navigated major transformations the company isn’t stopping there. It intends to build on the foundations that it has implemented.

Pilano and his HR technology team is looking at where automation can help, and how technology can become a seamless and “invisible” part of an employee’s day.  

He explains: “We are working on automation, we’re looking to augment the employee experience through the increased use of digital assistant and artificial intelligence.”  

As an example, “we’re looking at talent marketplaces.

“We have the technology, which can match work opportunities within the organization (think any deliverable, project, etc.) with the profiles of our people. But it means that as a function, HR needs to look at talent differently.” 

Pilano notes that “it’s not enough to just implement the technology, you need as well to change the mindset of the people.” In terms of talent management, this means removing department silos and recognizing that people could work across functions.  

Summarizing, Pilano states that “traditional talent management where you put people in boxes, etc, needs to be completely reinvented, by embedding the marketplace concept or business model within the organization.”  

This is an area that Pilano believes that Nestlé will explore further. 

In the immediate future, we have UNLEASH America. Pilano comments that he is looking forward to hearing from peers after “two years of massive changes, disruptions, and a lot of accelerations everywhere. 

“I’m really, really looking forward for this opportunity to pause, and to be exchanging thoughts with my peers on how we’ll address the future challenges.”  

Want to find out more about the future of work and successful digital transformation at Nestlé? Gregory Pilano is speaking at UNLEASH America in Las Vegas (25-26 May). See you there.