Sustainable Employability must
remain a lively topic within VLB
Eveline Hoogeveen has been working as an HR Advisor at Van Leeuwen Buizen Zwijndrecht since 2018. The strength of this international family business lies in the trade of steel pipes and pipe applications. Piet van Leeuwen started this successful company in 1924. Since then, the company has experienced enormous growth. Across 32 countries, Van Leeuwen employs 2,600 people worldwide. In the Netherlands, 320 employees work for the subsidiaries: a great challenge for the Dutch HR team to keep these employees vital and professionally skilled.
Aging workforce
‘The topic of Sustainable Employability (SE) has been a concern within the organization for some time. At Van Leeuwen, we have very loyal employees,’ says Eveline. ‘We have people who have worked with us for more than 30, 40, and sometimes even 50 years. That, combined with an ever faster-changing world, has been the reason for us to create more awareness around Sustainable Employability. Our Corporate Manager HR, Angelique van Gaans, was already familiar with SE workshops from MEPD. The connection was quickly made. After a pilot of the workshop for the HR team and Works Council members (and an evaluation), we wholeheartedly said yes. Especially the aspect of ‘awareness’ convinced us.”
First step towards awareness
Are our employees sufficiently aware of changes in technology? What does this mean for their own job? Will they still be able to do their jobs in a few years’ time? And what do they need to do to keep up? As an employer we want to facilitate this, but employees themselves also need to be in control and stay that way. That awareness is what we really want to create: you are at the wheel yourself. The Managing Director Netherlands, Steven Ruijters, supported the SE programme, and so we organized 23 workshops across the Dutch subsidiaries. The groups were mixed (warehouse and office) and everyone was invited. After the workshop, we offered employees the opportunity to register for a personal coaching session with MEPD. In this session, they could discuss their own situation. That helps them to take another step forward.
Technological developments are moving incredibly fast
For me personally, what stuck most were the videos showing the incredibly fast pace of technological developments. It remains an interesting question how, as an organization, we deal with this. But certainly also how I as an employee handle this: What impact do these changes have on my HR role? What is my goal on the horizon? How do I want to develop myself? Good questions to think about.
What’s next?
It’s now important to process all the feedback from employees from, among other things, the roundtable discussions in the workshop. We see that most feedback concerns the topics of communication, leadership, future perspective, and continuity. Additionally, we’ve heard that employees really appreciate the attention being given to SE, and that they themselves can actively contribute.
We consider a follow-up very important. It’s not something temporary. We want SE to remain a recurring topic. Exactly how we will do this, we’ll work on in the coming months. But I can imagine that we will come up with a policy document in which we tell managers and employees how we can continue to talk about SE together,’ says Eveline.
