The great re-evaluation: Reimagining work-life integration

A conversation with Jayde Hill, Head of People & Culture at Publicis Groupe NZ, about the country’s talent challenge and creating an environment in which people love to work.

Is the great resignation really upon us? What’s your perspective on what’s happening in the talent market right now? 

I think what we’re actually experiencing is the Great Re-evaluation, with many people questioning what they want from their life and work after the turmoil of the past few years. People are moving out of cities, and looking at changing careers, returning to study or turning a passion into a business. 

At Publicis, we’re prioritising providing internal mobility across our brands locally and also around our global network. What this has provided is the opportunity for our people to pursue a new career or develop a new skill set while staying within the broader Publicis Groupe family.

Last year, 11 percent of our roles were filled internally, and this will continue to be a key option for us moving forward. Importantly, we take a transparent, supportive approach to mobility because, ultimately, as much as a brand might be sad to see a star performer go, we’d rather keep that talent within the group than have it go elsewhere. 

When New Zealand’s border reopens in the coming months, I think the industry will potentially be faced with an exodus of talent, as the backlog of Kiwis who’ve put off OEs or relocations will now feel confident to go ahead. Last year, we launched two key initiatives related to this challenge. The first, Reunion, allowed team members who’ve been separated from family living overseas to return home and reconnect with them for an extended period. This has given us the ability to provide people with a workable way to stay in their current role with the group, yet also have the flexibility to get back to see their families, ultimately easing some of the emotional burden of being kept apart for so long. 

Most recently, the Publicis Groupe global network has launched Work Your World, an international employee mobility scheme that allows anyone to work from any of our offices in the world for up to six weeks. This means that everyone has the opportunity to effectively take a working sabbatical, gain inspiration, introduce their families to a new culture, or just fulfil a dream to work in a certain city. We’re excited about the potential this holds for our people. One hundred percent of the applications we’ve received so far have been approved, and we have staff either working or about to work from Ireland, India, Canada, the US, the UK and Spain. 

Importantly, we’re also looking at the next generation of talent coming through and ensuring it’s a diverse mix of people with a broad set of skills, life experiences and perspectives. We’re a proud supporting partner of TupuToa. TupuToa seeks to ensure corporate Aotearoa is representative of our country and that it’s providing a pathway for Māori and Pasifika students. 

We contribute funding to support this valuable work and have a commitment to take on three TupuToa interns per year for three years. 

What’s Publicis Groupe doing to ensure it retains and attracts the best talent? 

As a group, our core focus is ultimately on creating careers, not jobs — growing the opportunities our people have access to and supporting them to create true career pathways. We’re constantly looking at how we can support people to create their best work and, in turn, deliver greater solutions for our clients. We’re really proud of the market-leading offering we can provide, which recognises the fact we have a diverse workforce with varied lived experiences and therefore unique needs. 

The big shift for us has been the move away from looking at how we can create a great employee experience (EX) and towards how we can create a great life experience (LX). With this comes the recognition that work is just one aspect of our people’s lives, and there are many more things that make up who they are. 

In practical terms, one of the key ways in which we’re recognising this is through Publicis Liberté, our flexible working programme, which is based on a core set of behaviours, not a policy. It’s really about ensuring that work fits around our employees’ lives, not the other way around. We started this long before Covid arrived and it put us in a strong position when we had no choice but to flex during the past few years. There’s no one way to flex and Liberté recognises this and allows each individual to work with their manager to define what it looks like for them. 

In addition to this, we’re really focused on building a ‘well organisation’. It has never been more important to provide a healthy, supportive environment for our people as we ride the waves of uncertainty together. As part of this, we’ve rolled out a comprehensive mental health programme that has seen staff across our offices be trained as mental health first aiders. We’ve also updated our sick leave to become wellbeing leave. Throughout the lockdowns, we added additional holiday leave and Covid-care days that staff can take if they’re unwell, have children to look after or just need a day off to recalibrate.

We also provide domestic and gender-affirmation leave of up to 10 days, four days of study leave, five days of compassionate leave, birthday leave, World Mental Health Day leave and five days of Lion leave after a two-year tenure. Of course, these changes mean nothing without a culture that authentically supports and empowers people to put their wellbeing first, and that’s what we actively try to champion within every brand, every day. 

Having a child can be a critical moment in a woman’s career when the pay gap has the potential to widen and the trajectory of her career can be negatively Affected. What are you doing to support women, and indeed parents, at this important time? 

We’re really proud to offer one of the leading parental leave policies in the communications industry. Firstly, we encourage all parents to take up this opportunity and take an active role in their child’s early life by ensuring that they don’t feel pressured to rush back. As well as supporting mothers through this time, it’s really important to us that we encourage and normalise fathers taking parental leave as well. Our paid parental leave programme gives the primary caregiver up to 18 weeks of paid parental leave. Our Finance Director recently took six months’ parental leave when his third child was six months old, to spend some quality time with his young family and help enable his partner to return to work. 

On a parent’s return to work, we also provide an additional five days of ‘cub care’, in recognition of the extra days of sick leave that many parents need to take during their child’s first few years. 

We also recognise the incredible challenges some people face in having a child, so have recently added an additional allowance of 10 days of fertility treatment leave as well as five days of miscarriage leave. Further to this, we also offer a subscription to the Amber Network for people going through IVF treatment, and make our employee assistance programme available to immediate family members as well as our people.  

Publicis Groupe New Zealand’s connected platform comprises more than 270 staff and technology services across strategy, creativity, media, digital, data, CX, PR and digital business transformation, and has full-service offices in Auckland and Wellington. For more information, email Jayde at jayde.hill@publicisgroupe.com.

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