The HR Leader in discussion with Haleon’s head of HR on rebranding and new office space

Healthcare company Haleon demerged from GSK on 18 July 2022. Abby Krauce, head of HR for Haleon ANZ, spoke with The HR Leader about how the part of the business now known as Haleon rebranded, how they shaped their culture, and how their workspace also changed.

Shandel McAuliffe, editor at HR Leader: “How did the rebrand intersect with culture?”

Ms Krauce: “We really experimented on our culture. We took about a thousand leaders through what we call this ‘deep immersion program’ around our three cultural pillars: do what matters most, go beyond, keep it human.”

“They said, ‘okay, we’re going to do this thing called the love bomb.’ Well, it worked. The word love in an organisation doesn’t happen very often, but they turned around and said, ‘We want you to go and find, over the week, five people and tell them what you love… not respect, not admire, but what you love about what they bring,” she explained.

Editor: “What were the results of the ‘love bomb’?”

Ms Krauce: “There were a lot of uncomfortable people with that. But as we cascaded this out and trialled it with our people, first of all they were shocked… All of a sudden I’m talking to people saying, ‘You know what I really love about you is the fact that you’re always really well prepared for meetings. You’re on time. It really helps us get off to a fast start and I can really rely on that and I really love that about you.’ And there was this immediate joy and connection from our people that were hearing this as we experimented.”

“As leaders, I guess that gave us the excitement to keep going forward with these experiments. And over that 12-week period I connected with colleagues all over the globe and we shared an experience together and we became really comfortable, being a little bit uncomfortable, experimenting with things and then cascading that down through the organisation.”

It’s that deep connection that we got through, what we call this ‘experience’ that we went on last year, that’s really been able to have us start this new organisation with a really strong culture that we’re all really connected with,” said Ms Krauce.

Editor: “How did your workspace change with the rebrand?”

Ms Krauce: “What mattered most was creating spaces that allowed people to do the work or the activities that they were doing that mattered most for them and their roles. So, be that they had space for deep thinking or be that they had space to do collaboration or innovation work.”

She continued: “We’re a team of quite different styles. So, some of us are very extroverted and some of us are more introverted … What we ended up experimenting with was, on the Wednesday, why don’t you work remotely and then you can get some of that focus work done. And then on the Friday we went, well, we’ll just pick up the whole team and we’ll go to the quietest space on the floor and we’ll have a team day in a quieter space.”

 “Experimenting is really important at Haleon. Sometimes it doesn’t work, and some parts were good.”

“We needed to have spaces where people were comfortable being themselves and working in a way that works for them, be it in a noisy energetic place or somewhere that’s either quieter or more reflective,” she said.

The transcript of this podcast episode, when quoted above, was slightly edited for publishing purposes. The full conversation with Abby Krauce is below.