L'Oréal launches world-first app to crack the company culture

When it comes to employee engagement, good pay is so last generation. The millennials have spoken: company culture is everything. Okay, okay, they still want to be paid for their work, but that’s a whole other story.

Ask any start-up: the way you “get things done around here” is just as important as your business model. It’s never been so important to re-think about how we approach professional growth, transparency, communication, fairness, recognition and well-being. 

It's no surprise then that research suggests that up to 50% of employee engagement comes from feeling like you’re a good fit with your company culture.

If company culture is the way we get things done around here, then employee engagement is the way we feel about the way we get things done around here - Deloitte University Press

Thanks to this culture-engagement love affair, feeling "at home" in a culture positively impacts every HR metric you could dream of – from increased job satisfaction, organizational commitment and job performance to lower turnover.

It’s no wonder then that the latest HR wave to ride is all about cultureboarding*. 

And some 89% of organisations agree that integrating corporate culture into onboarding programmes is essential. But, concretely, what have they done about it?

Well, for the newcomers at L’Oréal, now there’s an app for it.

As part of their wider, strategic onboarding programme for all newcomers worldwide, aptly named ‘Fit’, L’Oréal have developed the world’s first mobile application with the sole purpose of assisting newcomers to understand, decode and master their unique company culture. This follows their internal release of the Life@L’Oréal culture deck in 2016, a document to make the shared L’Oréal culture explicit and owned by all employees. 

Reaching up to 10 000 new hires per year and available in 11 languages, newcomers globally now have access to their own “pocket coach” to help them navigate the L’Oréal culture. 

Where did the idea to build an app on the company culture come from anyway?

 Where all the best ideas come from – the employees themselves. Being employee-centric and always having two feet on the ground helped L’Oréal to capture something striking about newcomers’ perceptions of the company culture, which is over 100 years in the making. It is full of paradoxes.

A mixture of surveys and semi-structured interviews on the newcomer experience highlighted countless aspects of the company culture that L’Oréal can be extremely proud of – for example, the loose job descriptions in order to give employees the freedom and autonomy they need to act as entrepreneurs in their roles. However, while some newcomers find this freedom incredibly energizing, others may equally feel a myriad of emotions – daunted, hesitant, anxious or surprised to name a few.

Of course, one could argue that rather than helping people to understand the culture, you must first recruit for the perfect cultural fit. L’Oréal are the first to admit that it would be near impossible to find any (honest) human being that loved every single aspect of a rich, complex and challenging culture as strong as L’Oréal’s. It's only natural to find some aspects more energizing than others depending on your profile, and you can absolutely succeed no matter what your preferences are. Further, the “you’re either L’Oréal, or you’re not” mantra is viewed as dangerous: a poor excuse for recruiting clones and too easily avoiding responsibility when a new recruit doesn’t thrive in their new environment.

With L’Oréal’s fierce efforts in the field of multiculturalism, diversity & inclusion, the enormous investment into refining their management practices and their desire to stay one of the top ranking employers of today, their stance is much more focused on giving new employees every imaginable opportunity to succeed.

And hence, L'Oréal's Fit Culture app was born. 

So what’s inside?

Created in collaboration with newcomers in over 30 countries, the app focuses on the 7 most critical aspects of the L’Oréal culture to master (according to the newcomers themselves). Real newcomers express the positives and challenges of each cultural aspect through videos, written testimonies and in giving practical advice.

Contributions from senior leaders inside the application have only served to reinforce or compliment what the newcomers are saying – never explain it away. 

The app concept is as follows:

• Capsules of content on topics such as entrepreneurship, agility, networking and cooperation.
• Each capsule contains a mixture of text, photos, videos, testimonials, quizzes and mini-games
• Newcomers complete real-life “missions” in order to put their learning into practice
• Newcomers win “Insider Secrets” (an interesting fact, story or legend about L’Oréal which is only known by those on the inside)

Deliciously bite-sized, newcomers complete the app by playing with it for around 5-10 minutes per day for their first month at L’Oréal. Entirely learner-driven, many prefer to do so during their commute to work, a coffee break or even as a “productive escape” from their day job, which L’Oréal strongly encourages.

By completing the application, newcomers are able to easily explain cultural subtleties, like why it is totally normal that they start receiving lunch invitations from complete strangers at work with no justification whatsoever!

Parting thought

While it is obvious that an app alone cannot capture the full richness of a company culture, it is a bold start and big leap forward in the world of digital learning. The power of the app is only further amplified when it is paired with other culture-focused initiatives within L’Oréal’s learning eco-system, such as culture-decoding seminars, learning games, mentor and buddy programmes.

While L’Oréal ensures that their newcomers are fully equipped to succeed, the newcomers thrive in the culture, making a big impact and, of course, feeling happier at work. L’Oréal then take yet another big step forward in their incarnation of what it means to be a Learning Company. It’s a big win all round.