Implementing Work-Levels in Global Companies

Speaker A I certainly was invited to a number of companies to work, including in those days, ici, Alcan, I remember a whole range of others. But the point here was that most of these companies would get you in to do a project on a piece of their organization and you'd be invited to study a section or a department. And it was only when the person in charge of organization development at the time approached me to work with Unilever that we really began. I began then to work on a country by country, project by project basis for Unilever about 15 or so years ago. And that became what I contend is probably I'm going to say this publicly, if it is public, the largest social science experiment ever undertaken. I mean, Elliot studied a factory, but we covered 300 400 factories, 110 countries, 260,000 people, 26,000 managers. I personally visited over 50 countries, worked in research in 50 of them over that period of time, and that was just the first company. Wow. So today, if you go into Unilever, every single person worldwide in Unilever will have a work level, not just in Unilever. So that was the big project and that occupied a large part of my time.

Speaker B But I think if I might, if.

Speaker A It'S sort of a personal view, when.

Speaker B I left Brunel, and even before then.

Speaker A I was really schizophrenic in my academic approach, because the work of Elliot and Wilfred and work levels and the work I did with Rafe was only half.

Speaker B Of my academic life.

Speaker A And as I took my research unit, I set up whilst I was at Brunel, a research unit which had nothing to do with levels of work or work levels. It was to do with the voluntary and what the Americans call the nonprofit sector. That's really where I made my academic name, insofar as I've got one and what I was paid to do at the LSA. Although I've mentioned Unilever, in fact, three of the top 20 companies in this country are now using work levels. Three of the top three of the top 20. So I don't know what the percentage is, but it's 15% of the top 20 companies are now using work levels. Unilever was the first, and I'll explain why they picked it up, but the second major company, which was about five years ago, was Tesco, which is probably the most dynamic company in this country, with the most highly regarded company in this country. And there is now a third multinational adopting the ideas. But back to your question of Unilever. Why do they adopt it?

Speaker B I think the starting point for many.

Speaker A Of them, or the entry point, was their own dissatisfaction with their existing grading systems and a sense that the old systems, hay and so on and so forth, didn't really answer a whole range of problems that they were facing. Some of those problems would have been very familiar to Elliot, obviously, but others were to do with globalization, the need for a system which would be capable of introducing in many different countries a system which could go across the functions you could use it in accounts departments, marketing right the way across the board research laboratories and so on. And a system which had the beauty of conceptual integrity, simplicity and clarity and power. Now, they bought in originally to the ideas because I think they wanted to replace their existing systems, but slowly it became like a virus that takes over the company. They suddenly realized that, in fact, work levels I call it work levels really impacted on every aspect of their work. So they started using it for career development, management development, for skills profiles, obviously for organizational structure, which was the key issue in the beginning. They used it for their factories, for whole countries, for regions, for departments, just about everything. And I got upstairs 40 box files of projects undertaken there, as I said, in 40 to 50 countries.

Speaker B So the more they used it, the.

Speaker A More they found it useful.

Speaker B And there have been I mean, I.

Speaker A Don'T know the extent you want to go into sort of the later history because obviously nothing is straightforward. I'm making it appear as if it's an easy exercise. But as ever, a global change project runs into all sorts of objections. You're fighting in transpositions people's views, change their status changes.