Case Study: How C&A maintains a lower than average turnover rate

Employers refer to their employees as the company’s greatest asset, yet many of them don’t have a solid strategy to keep employees healthy and engaged.

To spark off ideas for HR leaders, Jerene Ang speaks to Kris Lui, global head of HR at C&A, to understand how the company's healthcare and wellness programmes keeps employees satisfied.

Kris Lui, global head of HR, C&A explains that as long as C&A wants to be operate as a market leader, it needs to make sure that engagement is high – to be viewed as an employer of choice and continue to attract talent in addition to making staff feel proud to stay.

Hence, it spends a lot of time and effort to showing care to employees through health and wellness.

While C&A stands for the founder’s’ names – Clemens and August – in terms of framing the wellness and healthcare campaigns, it also stands for caring and amazing.

C&A’s healthcare and wellness programmes consists of two parts – mental and physical.

Among the mental aspects, C&A does charity work including the Inspiring Women Campaign, donations to NGOs, and the setting up of the C&A Foundation where charity is done out for the wellness of the employees and the society instead of for publicity.

“The mental aspect is very important because nowadays, the employees don’t only look at money, they also look at the meaning of the company, the purpose of the company and how it contributes to the society wellness and their wellness,” Lui says.

Read the full feature: Healthy recipes for an engaged workforce

As for the physical aspects, the company actively supports sports such as badminton, bowling, tug-of-war according to employees’ suggestions. “It shows that we are listening to the employees’ need and really gels us together as a team. The team spirit is there,” she explains.

These programmes are organised by a cross functional team of 10-12 with HR as a leader and facilitator. The team comes together with the company’s purpose and organisational engagement in mind and suggests programmes for the year to balance the needs of C&A’s diverse workforce, before sharing the proposals with the global or local management team.

At this point, Lui notes it is important to remind the management team that other than endorsing the programmes, they have to be visible in participating in the programme. Thereafter, the events are announced to employees through a townhall meeting.

Lui highlights that during the communication process, it is important to highlight the intent and purpose of the event as well as to “promote and market your initiative like it is a product” using a holistic marketing campaign.

Due to the clear company mission and programme intent, a majority of employees were very supportive and the events saw high participation rates.

The one challenge C&A faced is the occasional monetary challenge when with the finance team looking to cut programme budgets.

Read the full feature: Healthy recipes for an engaged workforce

“But when we have explained the objective of the programme, they are fine with giving us the budget,” Lui says.

“We also make the measurement – which is the employee survey – very clear.”

After the implementation of the programmes, C&A noted a 12 percentage point increase in employee satisfaction from 70% in 2015 to 82% this year.

Additionally, the company sees a lower than average turnover rate – with turnover being as low as a single digit in certain markets.

“In our Sourcing business, we have met 100% KPIs. This means that we can deliver on time, produce high quality trustworthy products which C&A is famous for among consumers,” Lui adds.

Photo / iStock