How is TomTom Preparing Itself For The 'Post-corona World?
Employers and employees have experienced that remote working upped productivity and, at the same time, improved the work-life balance. Also due to the global pandemic, the world saw a significant decrease (average of 21 per cent) in congestion, and an astonishing 28 per cent average decrease in congestion during rush hours. What does this mean for the future of work once we go back to normal? Will we fall into old routines, or have we learned something from this big experiment?
BW Businessworld decided onto digging deeper on this aspect and hence got on-board Arne-Christian van der Tang, CHRO, TomTom who further explained what he and his team have learnt from the big working from home experiment, and from internal surveys during the pandemic.
Further, he shall also be explaining as to how this will help put an end to rush hour, as they provide their employees the ultimate freedom to decide if they want to work from home, from the office, or from a combination of the two – with complete flexibility day-to-day.
The world TomTom’s driving towards will be a safer, cleaner, congestion-free world. That’s what moves us every day. That’s why we do what we do. As an organization, we continuously listen, learn and adjust our ways of working to create the best environment possible to enable employees to create the innovative technologies that will shape tomorrow’s mobility.
We’ve had a strong office-based culture. Most of our employees were used to working from the office four or five days a week. Safety always comes first with TomTom, so our employees switched to remote working since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a global technology company people were already used to collaborating across multiple locations and time zones, so working from home didn’t impact our services, and we kept the same level of productivity.
In fact, our employee survey revealed that most of our colleagues valued the time they saved without having to commute, and they experienced, despite challenges like teaching kids at home, a better work-life balance. But they also missed socializing with colleagues and working together in real life.
Overall, we’ve learned that work location was less important than we thought it was. So, we are preparing for a post-corona world where we can combine the best of both worlds. A world where choice and flexibility are key.
We started considering activity-based working strategy to benefit productivity and the environment. Thinking of it as less of a band aid and more of a long-term solution. That long-term solution is freedom on where we work. This encourages us to ask ourselves whether we really need to be in the office – the commute there and back equals a lot of preventable emissions.
That’s why we’re launching our new activity-based working strategy, named Working at TomTom. Inspired by feedback from TomTom’ers, it enables us to choose where we work – at home or in the office – depending on the task at hand.
Like with any large-scale transformation, we are approaching it step-by step, learning and adjusting as we go.
The first thing we did was to organize ourselves around different areas of expertise, focusing on maximizing the benefits of the employee journey and experience. From the new meaning of the office, the growing importance of the home workspace, the implication on our digitals tools or ensuring security, to the new skills we would need to develop. We’ve asked ourselves a million different questions, many times over.
We went through intense design thinking sprints, inventing and re-inventing possible solutions, considering the different needs personas we have internally may have, to solve the potential challenges ahead and maximize the benefits of the new ways of working. We also created a diverse user voice group that help us to validate preliminary findings or indicate us to go back to the drawing board. It’s important for us to ask for feedback.
The only way we will benefit from this transformation is to have our people as a part of the change.
TomTom is going through one of our most exciting journeys to transform the way we work to make TomTom the place where our employees can achieve more!
At TomTom we believe that strongly aligned organization values can overcome any challenge. The pandemic has only reaffirmed this belief and accelerated our agile journey to shape tomorrow’s mobility and contribute to a safer and cleaner world. From more technology innovations and automation, to completely new roles and hyper-specialists, gig-like projects, stronger environmental evangelism at the workplace and greater cross-cultural collaboration are some of the aspects of how the future of work will evolve.
In the post pandemic world, we see letting go of things that are needlessly fixed and adopt a full activity based working strategy, we see improved productivity, regaining of valuable time, learning of new skills along the way and delivering on our vision of a cleaner world by reducing the unnecessary commutes.
We care for our people and employee well-being is our priority. The pandemic accelerated and brought the sentiment forward strongly. We have professional counsellor support, mental well-being workshops, one-on-one support, and scores of webinars on ergonomics, stress, yoga and other physical fitness activities for our people. Last year we launched TomTom Buddy – where employees get connected to two other TomTom’ers from our offices around the world to get to know each other, exchange experiences and have a good time together. All of this continues irrespective of the pandemic and where we work from.
The heart of the W@TT is enabling employees to choose the workspace that best fits the activity they need to do. Post pandemic too, employee workspace at home will play a bigger role than before, which is why we introduced benefits like a one-time home office budget to support employees in improving their home office environment, and a monthly allowance to support employees in home office expenses.
At TomTom we have big plans and a bold vision for the future. Realizing it requires everyone to be involved, high levels of engagement and commitment to diversity and inclusion.
Our leaders, right from the Senior Leadership team, directly interact with employees globally through our quarterly all hands as well as online Ask Me Anything sessions. Employees can ask questions and upvote questions from colleagues - all anonymously. There are global and local platforms for employees. For instance, in Pune, we have a manager open forum to share, inform and interact on everything happening at TomTom, build trust with them and their teams.
We celebrate diversity and inclusion in many ways. Our virtual global events cover Diwali as well as King’s Day (celebrated in Netherlands), a talent contest, CSR give-a-thon quiz, sharing of home office set-up after we announced our activity-based working program - W@TT benefits and so much more. When the pandemic hit, everything we did in person transitioned seamlessly to the virtual world.
In fact, we've increased our engagement during the pandemic. In India, we are Great Place to Work 2020 certified and in the top 25 Best Workplaces 2020 in the IT-IT-BPM industry. Globally, Glint (by LinkedIn) places us amongst the top 10 per cent technology companies based on benchmark and our employee engagement survey.
We have a responsibility of creating the most innovative technologies to shape tomorrow’s mobility and contribute to a safer and cleaner world. To be able to do that our strategy uniquely combines upskilling employees on technology and strengthening leadership. DevOps and accelerating online is our way of working. Our online Centres of Technical Excellence bring to our employees robust upskilling and technical learning. We ensure our employees are making the most of these upskilling opportunities and are continuously learning.
We want TomTom’ers to get the most out of their careers at TomTom and achieve more with us, faster than anywhere else. To do this we offer a range of relevant technical, commercial, personal development and leadership skills training through face-to-face, online and external courses and conferences. As a learning organization, generally for one year we accumulate thousands of learning hours in soft skills, behavioural, management and leadership training programs.
Nurturing at TomTom is so much more than developing and learning. It’s also mentoring, inspiring, building a growth mindset and strengthening leadership. Here I’d like to call out our biggest global innovation event called TomTom Lab. It fosters learning, collaboration, and encourages our people to work together across units and making moon shot ideas real.
We will continue to listen to our people and give them an awesome experience at every step of their journey at TomTom. At the same time, we’ll grow leaders at every level in the organization and unleash the potential of every TomTom’er. Most importantly, we’ll continue to foster our inclusive environment, be sensitive to what is going on around us and make sure that TomTom offers a safe place to work and be yourself.
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