How To Build Belonging At A 350,000-Person Company
A leader’s perspective on making belonging a top priority in a giant people organisation and putting the S in ESG on the leadership agenda
RED LEADERSHIP PERSPECTIVES
A conversation between Jacob Aarup-Andersen, former CEO of ISS Group and current Carlsberg Group CEO, and Mads Holme, managing partner of ReD Associates
about
Jacob Aarup-Andersen was CEO of ISS Group from 2020-23. At ISS, Jacob has led a financial turnaround and the development of the ‘One ISS’ strategy with a core focus on technology and digitisation, sustainability and diversity, equity and inclusion. Prior to ISS, Jacob had senior leadership roles at Danske Bank and Danica Pension. He will soon take over as CEO of Carlsberg Group. Here, he talks to ReD about making belonging a core part of ISS’s story, embedding diversity and inclusion in a company’s enabling structures, and why the S in ESG should be a key focus for the leaders of tomorrow.
ISS
ISS was founded in Copenhagen in 1901 and has grown to become one of the world’s leading facility services companies offering a wide range of services such as cleaning, catering, security, property and support services as well as facility management. ISS operates in more than 30 countries across Europe, Asia Pacific, North America and Latin America, serving thousands of both public and private sector customers. Working from the core idea that “people make places and places make people” ISS strives to build excellent customer experiences through technology, sustainability, and diversity and inclusion.
ReD: Why is belonging important for ISS, your strategy, and your story?
Jacob Aarup-Andersen: ISS has always been a people business, ever since we were founded in 1901. For the past 122 years, the DNA of our company has been to grow and develop people. Our belief has always been that our people add a human touch to create places that deliver experiences and productivity – whether in cleaning, food services or workplaces. I would say that we have always been a company focused on belonging – but it wasn’t until recently that we started being more explicit about using the word and talking about our story. To put things into perspective, ISS global today is a business with more than 350,000 people – and we hire 125,000 new employees every year due to the high turnover in the industry. We want to do everything we can to make every person feel they belong.
Why did we want to put so much emphasis on belonging? We are already facing an extreme war on talent, something that will only intensify in the coming years – especially in the industry we are in. And this is despite the many technological and automation advancements we see. Just to give an example, 50% of the service workforce in the US today is above 60 years old. But the primary drive on belonging actually came from inside the company. When I first joined ISS a few years ago, I came into a company with a culture that was strong but quite tacit and unarticulated. At the same time, it had a culture and leadership that had been too focused on performance and financials. Plus, we had an executive team that wasn’t global enough. Simply put, there were too many 50-year-old white men around. We asked ourselves: how can we take our great company culture into the future and to the next level? How can we be more explicit about our purpose and our belonging agenda while driving stronger commercial performance? I wanted us to better solve this in the way we lead, communicate, and operate the company – especially by creating better enabling structures around fairness, diversity, and inclusion. A central step to accelerate this was to hire a new global head of diversity and inclusion to lead our agenda. Together with the executive team we identified five priorities around how we can improve our enabling structures as a company. These have been formulated in areas around pride, gender balance, generations and age, cultures, race and ethnicity and finally (dis)abilities.
ReD: What are some of the ways this diversity and inclusion agenda is implemented and safeguarded at ISS?
Jacob: In some companies, people use belonging and DEI interchangeably but they are actually different concepts for us, even though they are connected. DEI is the foundation for being able to deliver on our belonging ambition. In ISS, DEI is about addressing structural and measurable challenges around issues like diversity and gender balance. On the other hand, belonging is a social frame, it speaks to something emotional and experienced – a feeling that you belong. It is about emotional safety. This is also why we at ISS call our employee value proposition: “A place to be you.” As a global company with more than 350,000 employees operating in more than 30 countries this is a big ambition to deliver on. We want to be the world’s best company on belonging, which means being a place where every employee feels included, respected and heard. An important part of this ambition is to be bigger than the company. It is about being a thought leader on building a better society for all, by fighting for implementing living wages in many of the markets we operate in, for instance. We do this because we believe it is important to lift the agenda for the many people that are critical to make society and workplaces function. Many of our people are immigrants or people who have moved to a new country; people who often are hidden, under-represented or not heard in public debates. This is also why we do not use the word blue-collar or service workers because there is a slightly negative tone associated with it. We call all our employees placemakers because we believe in the value they deliver. Another important initiative for me to mention is that we increasingly partner with organisations supporting causes we deem worthy from around the world. One of the organisations we are proud to be working with is Tent, a nonprofit that mobilises the business community to improve the lives and livelihoods of refugees all over the world. Tent’s 250 members include Amazon, H&M, Adidas, Hilton, L’Oréal and Pfizer.
“We want to be the world’s best company on belonging, which means being a place where every employee feels included, respected and heard.”
ReD: How do you measure and see the results of your DEI and belonging agenda? What are some of the specific initiatives or investments that have enabled you to deliver on this – and what results are you most proud of?
Jacob: Many of our diversity and inclusion priorities are driven by passionate employees, in other words, from the grassroots of the company. This has been an important learning for me: initiatives should not always be driven from the top. But it was and is important for me as CEO and for the executive team that we are all measured on how well we deliver on belonging. It is our shared responsibility to lift the agenda together. In addition to being measured on business performance and sustainability, we as leaders are also measured on how well we are delivering on the belonging agenda in our respective priority areas. And while we are still on a journey, we have seen a number of important results. When we first started, only 3% of leadership positions in the revenue generating parts of the business were filled by women; today we have more than 50%. We also worked hard to change the composition of our global board, and today we almost have an equal split between men and women. More broadly from a business perspective, when I look at our customers and the way we run our business, we are now starting to see a change in how they think and what we offer. More and more we see requests for proposals from big corporate clients specifying the importance of DEI. While our competitors haven’t prioritised this as much, we can really see that this has become one of our unique selling points tied to our key account structure and business model of self-delivery. Every ISS person in every customer facility is trained, equipped, motivated and working to our high standards.
ReD: What were the defining moments during this transition?
Jacob: One of my key CEO priorities has been to lift the belonging agenda by communicating much more both internally and externally; in town halls, on LinkedIn, with journalists, on investor calls, and in training sessions. But I’ve also learnt to be mindful and honest about what agendas you want to lead and be involved in. If you only let your social media activities guide this you will end up disorienting yourself. You can easily post every day on this world day or that world day but is that really sincere? We have become more deliberate about our position and what agendas we support and want to speak to. It has been a humbling journey, and we as leaders have been very clear that we are constantly faced with dilemmas. One of the things that was difficult for us was when we announced the opening of our new headquarter hub in Poland. Many employees reacted critically to this because of the Polish government’s homophobic policies. There were intense discussions about this within the company so we decided to bring people together and openly explain our rationale and that ISS will not compromise on our global standards on belonging. But I think as a CEO, it’s important to go into these dilemmas acknowledging that I don’t know all the answers. We will all make mistakes on this journey. Navigating these social and cultural dilemmas while building better enabling structures is something I’ve wanted – and needed – to educate myself on.
“To me the next big thing will be the S, social, and figuring out how to deliver on the people, culture and belonging agenda.”
ReD: What do you see as the CEO’s role today and what mindsets will be most important in the future?
Jacob: Over the past five years, as CEOs, we have come a long way when it comes to prioritising the E in ESG and building better structures to measure how we comply with the environment and climate agenda to make this a more integrated part of our business. But we’re not done. To me the next big thing will be the S, social, and figuring out how to deliver on the people, culture, and belonging agenda. I see many executives who are uncertain or lack understanding, processes or methods for how to really deliver on this social agenda and connect it clearly to their competitive edge as a company. We already have strong, upcoming leaders. The superstars are no longer just the finance wizards. You still need to be able to drive results and performance but how you do it will be different. I think we will see a future generation of leaders that will have more focus on creating whole organisations, while still being deeply ambitious. Leaders will have a much stronger focus on talent development, attraction and creating high performing teams who are both physically, ethnically and cognitively diverse.
ReD: It has just been announced that you will soon become the new CEO of Carlsberg Group. What leadership and cultural learnings will you bring with you from ISS?
Jacob: As a person and CEO I am driven by four key principles: be value-based in the way you lead; be positive; bring energy; and always be ambitious. I will bring these principles with me in my new role.
Three recommendations for other leaders looking to make belonging a core part of their organisation
The belonging agenda needs to be led and owned by the CEO. You cannot expect it to drive change if it is only driven by a department or function.
Belonging has to become part of your value proposition. It has to be real for it to deliver business results.
DEI and belonging have to be programmatic, embedded in your company’s enabling structures.
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