DS Smith

DS Smith’s Engaging Manager initiative supported by the CareerCENTRE

Executive Grapevine have recently published an article called “The business case for the Engaging Manager”. It explains how DS Smith, a global provider of sustainable packaging operating in 36 countries implemented an Engaging Managers initiative.

A catalyst for this initiative was an employee survey which showed that employees had widely varying understandings of  DS Smith values. Their Chief Executive, Miles Roberts, appreciated that work was required to provide colleagues with a better sense of why the company needed to do something.

So the ‘Engaging Managers’ project was born. Its aim was to help managers at all levels learn how to articulate the direction of the business, increase employee engagement and become role models for these corporate goals and was achieved by focusing on values.

Managers mostly learned from managers but were also supported by 10Eighty’s CareerCENTRE™ which provided a powerful platform for the organisation to understand values and more effectively apply them at work. The CareerCENTRE™ was re-designed as a 1-page site to enable all DS Smith employees to explore their values. This initiative was innovative in many ways but specifically because it was:

• inclusively designed by an internal team of experts
• delivered internally

which was made possible by developing an international L&D network with 63 home-grown facilitators.