The Company
Few are familiar with Vola A/S, the company – But everyone knows its products!
Since 1969 Vola A/S has produced the famous sanitary fittings that were originally designed by the architect Arne Jacobsen in 1961. Through the years, these fittings have been honored with various design prizes, and have displayed at many famous galleries, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Museum of Applied Art in Cologne, the Cincinatti Art Museum, and Munich’s Die Neue Sammlung. Today, Vola’s distribution net covers 25 countries, and its timeless products are perhaps more popular than ever before.
Focus Areas
Active leadership
”Even though Vola has grown into a mid-size company, we’re holding on to the idea that HR functions shouldn’t be reserved strictly for an HR department. In our company, HR is just part of being a leader,” says factory director Bo Fischer Larsen. “Each manager’s task is to turn our mission into reality by actively leading his or her employees. And that means, of course, that our managers must assume full responsibility for employees. However, this also requires that we in upper-management equip our managers with the tools they need to live up to and honor these requirements.”
Lean Talent Management
”A few years ago, we conducted a project to make our employee processes leaner, and if there’s anything that one learns from being lean, it’s the need to standardize. First and foremost, this means standardizing our HR processes so that they don’t mutate differently in the three primary organizational areas in Vola. We’re also standardizing employee competencies into broader, so-called “blocks” rather than narrow specialties which is a characteristic typical of more traditional, functionally split, organizations. This gives us more competent and more flexible employees that are also more satisfied with their work due to the simple fact that they’re able to do more.”
MindKey™ HCM chosen over many systems
”When we realized that we must support all HR functions and workflows with one IT system, we looked at several possible options. In the end though, we chose MindKey HCM because we determined that they are strongest in the soft dimensions. Where some companies perhaps were sharper on the administrative side, MindKey HCM stood out as being exceptional in competence management and, of course, at getting everything to work together. For us, MindKey is just as much a consulting partner as it is an IT provider. Consulting is important for us in this phase, where we need help pushing our mission out into our operations by improving individual employee discussions and performance management. In a technology influenced company like ours, we’ve always known that we’re able to turn up the effectiveness of a machine. The ability to do the same with human capabilities, if developed and motivated properly, is a new concept for us,” concludes Bo Fischer Larsen.
Benefits
Vola expects that implementing MindKey HCM will mean:
- Unified access to HR, without a central HR department
- A platform to promote the company’s values throughout it’s operations
- A long-sighted, mutually-binding, personal development initiative for all employees
