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Blocket puts spotlight on leadership to accelerate growth
Since early 2019 Blocket has a new strategy, a new CEO, and a new and very clear mission: to accelerate growth. Multiple change initiatives have been initiated, and work to develop and strengthen the desired culture is ongoing. By strengthening each individual leader in the company, Blocket aims to optimize both employee engagement and growth.
The challenge and mission:
- Clear growth goals, where strong employee engagement is defined a “driver” of success
- Give all leaders support in developing leadership habits that supports and stregthens engagement
- Promote a culture where all leaders continuously develop their leadership, and where it’s okay to practice, experiment, make mistakes, and try again.
Leadership training with Yomento
Yomento offers a digital nudging tool, designed to inspire and guide leaders to practice daily leadership behaviors in the flow of work. Since building new habits takes time and effort, Yomento and Blocket designed a joint leadership journey for the leaders throughout 2020:
- A clear, overarching goal for Blocket: to strengthen engagement for both employees and leaders
- A training goal for each and every leader
- The Yomento Personal Leadership Traininer to make training happen
- Recurring leadership forums for discussing the training, sharing experiences, and strengthening learning
- Peer coaching where the leaders meet in smaller groups to support and challenge each other
- Regular training reports to follow up on the practice and inspire continued training
“Since we started with Yomento, our training is always on the agenda when all leaders meet. I present our training data and we discuss how the training is going; what’s challenging or difficult. The leaders have been very positive about this format”
Maria Nylén, Chief People & Culture Officer at Blocket
Training data contributes to strategic planning
All training activities on a group level (not individually) can be tracked in real-time on the Leadership Dashboard. The data is used by Blocket as a strategic foundation for following progress and evaluating what additional measures to take moving forward.
”We try to keep lazer focus on our most important business objectives, and we regularly discuss outcomes and activities related to those. Based on the training data, we can easily see if we are doing the right things to strengthen our goals related to employee engagement. We don’t need to wait until the next measurement and just hope for the best” says Maria Nylén and continues:
“And we are doing the right things; after only two months of daily training our people tells us through the pulse survey that their leaders have improved”
Every month training data is shared with the leaders, so they can follow the group’s progress and support, challenge, and inspire each other. The continuous communication in important to boost motivation and long-term engagement.
”It’s inspiring to see how the Blocket’s leaders take their assignments and training seriously. They have set ambitious training goals for themselves, and they are delivering on them. They also supply us with feedback on how we can improve our solution for them – which we love!” says Anna Kempe, Head of Customer Success at Yomento.
“The expectations from me are clear: our leaders, me included, should develop continuously. In just a short amount of time we’ve achieved an important focus on both the leaders’ and the employees’ development. For me it is crystal clear; our business will grow with our people”
Pernilla Nissler, CEO at Blocket
Impact and results – how did it go?
The ultimate goal, to strengthen engagement, has been measured monthly throughout the year and peaked during the spring and summer, even after Covid-19 made its unexpected entrance. During the fall 2020, engagement has however turned slightly downwards. Maria Nylén is not surprised, considering the extraordinary times and challenges that the pandemic and working from home brings for both individuals and leaders. Based on this, lots of new initiatives to stimulate engagement have been introduced at Blocket all through the year.
I am really proud of all the efforts our leaders have put into their leadership mission this strange year. Already two months into this leadership training initiative we could see impact in our pulse survey; we actually reached all time high levels! It has been difficult to stay on those levels, but it is still clear that engagement levels are higher in the parts of the organization where leaders actively invests to improve in their daily leadership
After almost 12 months of daily leadership practice, every leader at Blocket has engaged in 76 development activities (on average).
Altogether, a total sum of 3,792 activities has taken place – mostly from the home office.
