CASE STUDY: Haleon
A human centric approach to Employer Branding
The Challenge
Haleon is a world leader in Consumer Healthcare; home to iconic brands such as Sensodyne, Centrum, Panadol and Volateren. Today, they’re a c£30 billion business, having launched in July 2022 as a break away from pharmaceutical giant GSK.
Two years before separation, our job was to create a Global EVP and EX Design blueprint for an organisation that didn’t yet exist. A highly complex challenge and an extraordinary opportunity.
The Solution
As Haleon built a new organisation and culture, we worked concurrently to define their future offering. We collaborated closely with their leadership team, brand, EX, EVP as well as a steering group comprising subject matter experts that would be designing EX. We remained agile, continuously testing our proposition over two years to align with the evolving purpose, brand, and changing employee sentiments and macro world trends & events.
Our approach centered on human-centric design, facilitated by a community platform that engaged hundreds of global employees. We delved into their motivations, pain & gain points, and everyday experiences across the employee journey. We asked them to write postcards to their leaders to tell them what they should keep, start & stop doing. This rich understanding of employees as individuals informed our insights.
We also conducted external research across eight markets to gauge professionals’ perceptions of a career in consumer healthcare and what would make this organisation truly game-changing.
To bridge our research findings with the employee experience, we hosted workshops with our steering group using Design Thinking to inspire future-focused ideation. This effort culminated in “The Haleon Experience,” which serves as far more than a brand playbook. We also created workshops and guidance for designing EX throughout the whole organisation – wherever the ‘designer’ happened to sit. The aim was that every policy, process, and programme aligns with the promises made.
As a new company, this emphasis on evolution means that the employee experience will continue to shape itself as new talents join and the Haleon culture gains momentum.
The Results
Our aim was to ensure that the EVP would be more than just a communications platform – it would be a strategic tool to guide those designing the everyday experience towards actions and decisions that enrich the employee experience and deliver on the promise.
