L’Oréal Malaysia: Being a responsible employer

Nora Mahbob, HR director at L’Oréal Malaysia, explains the four cornerstones of protecting and caring for employees under the company’s share and care programme.

People have always been at the centre of L’Oréal – so providing the most innovative programmes for talent acquisition, talent development and social protection is deeply rooted in the tradition of the company.

Because economic success and corporate social responsibility go hand-in-hand, L’Oréal’s HR policy is a key element of the CSR strategy, placing employee welfare at the core of the HR vision. This is why in 2013, we launched our global social protection programme, L’Oréal share and care.

The share and care goal is to provide the best possible environment where employees can work with peace of mind, knowing their social needs are taken care of. The programme covers four key domains for our employees – social protection, health, parenting and quality of working life.

Before designing the programme, we conducted a comprehensive survey in all 65 countries to assess the existing situation. The results of the survey were very surprising – L’Oréal already offered good social standards on social protection, healthcare, parenthood and wellbeing at work.

Thus, our ambition became to gradually take this further, ensuring all employees were provided at least the same minimum standard treatments, while at the same time, making sure our practices were everywhere at a level of the top performing companies.

We truly believe this strong commitment will also help us to be more creative and innovative, to ensure we are always one step ahead in this challenging domain.

In Malaysia, we highlighted parenthood as a priority because more than 70% of our workforce is female. It is important for our female employees to find balance with their family life and being engaged at work.

With this in mind, we introduced 14 weeks of maternity leave, provided maternity allowance, and a dedicated “Wow Mom” room for mothers to nurse with privacy.

Second, we recognise quality of working life is an important aspect and we want to create an environment which allows staff to enjoy and enhance their motivation and engagement with the company. To do this, we created an internal working committee called WeConnect to introduce fun and engaging events – from organising thematic festive celebrations, family days, CSR events, movie nights and free lunches for all employees every Tuesday and Thursday.

We also introduced a coffee break corner on all floors for employees to enjoy during work hours. This is managed by our hearing and speech impaired employees as part of the company’s commitment to CSR and promoting diversity.

Finally, we are committed to taking care of employee health and wellbeing. We wanted to go beyond a reimbursement of medical treatment and encourage preventative initiatives and awareness training. We increased our health protection insurance and now provide health screening subsidies for all employees. We also organise regular wellbeing days where we invite healthcare professionals to provide awareness talks to encourage employees to stay healthy.

I feel that in HR, we are in a profession where our purpose is to contribute to the wellbeing of a person. I’m deeply passionate about this, as I am convinced there is a direct relationship between feeling good and doing well.

A company in the 21st century cannot develop in a sustainable manner without taking into account all the societal dimensions that constitute it. The human and social dimension is, in my eyes, what will make the difference.