Developing top HSW talent is key for Vodafone

01 July 2020 by Kendelle Tekstar
blog author

“At Vodafone, we take our responsibility to ensure the people who work for us, and on our behalf, work safe and get home safe. To do that, we need to ensure we have the right talent for the future by developing and stretching our HSW community to prepare the next generation of HSW leaders within Vodafone. The real value was the individual coaching sessions provided by Kendelle who really helped challenge perceived barriers and enabled an increased openness in interactions. Kendelle maintained the perfect balance between challenge, trust and empathy to build rapport, which helped keep the conversations real and honest.”

- Helen Davitt, Group HSW Manager & Acre Frameworks Programme Sponsor

For large global businesses, delivering effective learning and development programmes in a dynamic environment poses particular challenges – achieving an overall standard whilst creating local flexibility across geographies, large scale investment of time and money to maintain personal development reviews, and overcoming ‘this is the way we have always done it around here’ for the sake of continuous improvement. Furthermore, historically in the health, safety, and wellbeing profession, non-technical skills have not been prioritised equally with technical skills.

As a forward thinking business, Vodafone sought out the Acre Frameworks team to overcome these challenges in the HSW function with dedicated, bespoke development support from an external provider with a fresh pair of eyes. In order to effectively develop and retain HSW talent across the globe at Vodafone, a professional partnership was forged to deliver the HSW Rising Stars programme, which has now been running for over 2.5 years.

Acre Frameworks’ non-technical behavioural competency tool created specifically for HSW professionals was a meaningful starting point for the Rising Stars to define their developmental focus areas. Ongoing coaching from an Acre Frameworks Development Coach on a quarterly basis enabled them to refine those objectives and follow a structured approach to goal setting with reflective learning practices integrated. A 360 feedback tool was administered to balance out the self-report measure, deepening the Rising Stars’ learnings in regards to how their key stakeholders in and outside of the business perceive them. With bolstered self-awareness alongside improved self-confidence and self-efficacy, a group of self-leaders began to emerge.

To bring the first cohort’s programme to a close, the Rising Stars then circled back to undergoing the initial behavioural competency tool to evaluate shifts in behaviour during the programme. Due to the success of the programme, Vodafone engaged Acre Frameworks to work with a new cohort the following year.

To learn more about how Acre Frameworks can support your team, please get in touch today by emailing frameworks@acre.com or calling +44 (0) 20 7400 5570.

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