Employee Benefits Live 2016: Frontier Agriculture celebrates and reinforces its key values through a peer-nominated awards initiative.
The organisation’s ICE Awards, ‘ICE’ acting as an acronym for the principles the organisation wishes to promote – integrity, customer focus and expertise – are based around peer recognition, with colleagues nominating each other for awards.
Jon Berry (pictured), head of human resources at Frontier Agriculture, said: “This is for truly exceptional contributions in line with the ICE values. It is an employee-nominated process, so it’s not about management making those decisions; it’s employees nominating their colleagues. It’s actually a really powerful way of embedding those principles.”
With 950 employees across more than 40 UK locations, Frontier Agriculture’s mission is to be a first choice employer within the agriculture sector.
The organisation is working to promote other initiatives that align with its core values, such as sustainability, health and safety, and enabling staff to engage more easily with the local community.
Berry spoke alongside Tim Kensey, HR director at Nomad Foods Europe, and Rebecca Seymour, head of HR at Peugeot Citreon, in the Employee Benefits Live 2016 session titled HR’s role in helping establish corporate and brand identity.
Kensey outlined the challenges of creating a brand identity from scratch following a merger, which saw heritage brands such as Birds Eye, Iglo and Findas join together to form the Nomad Foods Group last year.
The organisation had to adjust the already established Iglo and Me identity into something that would resonate with the new business, expanding to incorporate the 17 countries in which it operates and with the agility to adapt to any future expansions that may take place.
Looking to adopt a consistent approach across the business, the organisation had to reestablish its core values and mission for the new Nomad and Me identity, and connect these back to business objectives.
Next month, Nomad Foods Group will launch eight new values, as well as sharing the organisation’s mission with staff, and updating its HR processes to deliver consistency across the business. Employees will be encouraged to embrace the organisation’s values, with outstanding recognition celebrated in the quarterly People Awards, which will name a value champion.
Kensey said: “We’re a new [organisation], coming together, with really great heritage brands. We’ve got some really great strategic brands, we’ve got that history, we’ve got [the] current culture in many of the markets and we want to bring it together under one new brand. We are trying to align the things that we do together, all one way across the organisation.”
During the session, Peugeot Citreon’s Seymour highlighted the challenges around establishing a succinct corporate identity. The organisation plans to review its reward platform, PSA Pretium, next year in order to better align it with its business values. Seymour said: “What was a mistake [with the platform] was that we moved away from our brand and our true identity.”
The organisation continues to learn and develop its approach to corporate identity, explained Seymour. Recent steps include opening out its office space, gathering feedback questionnaires from staff, and looking at its recruitment process and strategy.