Learning and development is an essential part of engaging and empowering our employees if sustainability is to be something we do together, every day. We take a localised approach to our employee engagement on sustainability, which means we can focus on the issues that really matter in each region.
Our in-store colleagues are the ambassadors of our sustainability approach to our customers, making them a particularly important audience for training and engagement on this topic. Every customer-facing campaign we run at C&A is supported by internal communications and engagement, allowing in-store colleagues to bring our messages to life for customers.
Supporting employees’ development
We aim to support our employees’ personal and career development while they are with C&A. Across our markets, we make e-learning available to our employees on core topics, and run management development programmes that deliver additional training to managers with outstanding performance and potential.
In 2018, specific employee training programmes included:
New hire orientation:
Function-specific sustainability training:
Leadership and talent development:
Other initiatives:
Aligning sustainability with learning and performance management
For sustainability to truly become something we do every day, it needs to be embedded within training and objectives for those employees we trust with the delivery of our goals, such as our Sustainable Supply Chain (SSC) team and the Fabric team that works with organic and Better Cotton. In Brazil, for instance, we provide annual training to the SSC team on audit protocol, document review, and checklist use.
Delivering on employee engagement plans
In 2018, we continued developing a global employee engagement approach for sustainability in alignment with the regions’ sustainability engagement plans. These plans leverage our Inspiring World initiative to:
Execution of these plans began with the launch of our global #WearTheChange platform in early 2018, and continued throughout the year to include our evolution from Inspiring Women to the new, multifaceted Inspiring World campaign.