Working at Philips
To become an even more market-driven and people-centric company we have been working to increase organizational effectiveness and simplify our structure. We believe it is important that employees are engaged – that they feel part of a team, know their ideas and suggestions count, trust their manager, and value diverse perspectives. It is crucial that we communicate properly among ourselves and that everyone is given full opportunity to use their individual talents. Leaders who do well in connecting our people with the long-term Philips ambitions are highly recognized.   Philips employees are engaged and have proven resilient during a year of restructuring and economic uncertainty. We accelerated planned initiatives to increase organizational effectiveness and simplify our structure. Within Healthcare, for example, we focused on de-layering our management structure to increase speed of execution and lower operating costs. In addition to less layers and costs, simplifying Philips means culture change. Reducing management layers brings people ‘on the shop floor’ closer to the Board of Management and gives managers a broader span of control. As a result they delegate more and focus more on getting the right people on their teams. Unfortunately transformation necessitates job cuts. As a people-centric organization, we support those affected responsibly and with respect. While engagement remains high, we aim higherWe seek honest feedback from our employees and are pleased that 91% of them participated in the 2009 Employee Engagement Survey. At 68 the overall engagement index is two points short of our high-performance target of 70. Although we aim higher, it is encouraging to see that our engagement levels remain high and have improved in several of our businesses. The survey offers valuable insights into how we can improve. Teams talk about results in open, honest ‘Deep Dive’ sessions. In this way root causes of any issues arising from the survey are addressed and corrective actions put in place. Diversity and inclusion continues to evolveDiversity allows us to better understand our customers and meet their needs. While the percentage of female executives across our company has remained stable at 10%, we continue to focus on achieving our goal of increasing that number to 15% by 2012. Because we recognize it is vital to have local staff to organize around customers and markets, we will grow the number of executives with BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) nationality. Philips Pride, our network for gays, lesbians and gay-friendly colleagues, has grown to over 150 members, mainly based in the Netherlands and US.   We are strengthening the alignment between individual objectives and overall company goals, and emphasizing the importance of how we work. Given today’s challenging economic climate, it’s more important than ever that we keep working to achieve our aim of becoming a people-focused, market-driven company with a strong, performance-oriented culture. To make this a reality, we are unleashing a One Philips mentality, inspiring leaders to strive for results not just in their own business or function, but for Philips as a whole. We also are encouraging a way of working that’s much more in line with the four Philips Values – Delight customers, Deliver great results, Depend on each other, Develop people – which summarize the behavior we think is vital to our success as a company. Changing how we manage performanceWe are changing the way we evaluate and reward our people. To emphasize how important it is to live the values in everything we do, with ‘Leading to Win’, our employees are assessed not just on what they achieve (results) – but also on how they achieve it (behavior). ‘Leading to Win’ is about aligning the way we set targets, manage and reward performance with our ambition to become a high-performance growth company.
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