De Beers 

Innovative Practice/Initiative: Work-Life Balance

Organisation Profile 

Since 1888, De Beers has been involved in all aspects of the diamond business. From its mining operations across Africa, and most recently Canada, the company produces about 40 per cent of the world's supply of rough diamonds.

De Beers has been active in Canada for nearly 50 years, growing from a small group of geologists in the field to having multiple offices and operations across the country.  De Beers has two producing mines, one advanced exploration project and a targeted exploration strategy within Canada:

Snap Lake Mine in the Northwest Territories is a remote mine site (fly in fly out operation) Victor Mine in northern Ontario is also a remote mine site (fly in fly out operation) Gahcho Kue Project in the Northwest Territories is a joint venture with Mountain Province Diamonds. The project is in the advanced exploration stage and currently is in the analytical phase of permitting in the Northwest Territories.

The Organisation's Initiative

In November 2009 during an offsite De Beers Canada-wide team building meeting held an issue was raised that there was a perceived lack of work/life balance among the senior management team. Discussion regarding the issue ensued and a commitment to review the concern was undertaken. When the senior management team from the Toronto office met following the session, in the spirit of high performance and taking ownership and accountability of not only our own success but that of our colleagues, the team decided that we needed to conduct a thorough follow-up.

Because an issue with work/life balance was seen as a potential impediment to the organization practicing a culture of high performance, a workstream of six senior managers from a variety of disciplines volunteered to pro-actively address this concern. The workstream mandate was to validate, determine and/or synthesize the issues and common themes that affect work/life balance at De Beers Canada and to provide recommendations for improvement as deemed appropriate. Click here to view the project chart.

The workstream selected a statistically representative sub set of the Toronto workforce in mid-March 2010 and decided to conduct face to face interviews with a total of 18 employees out of a possible 85. The sub set of interviewees were representative of all departments, disciplines and levels within the Toronto office which included corporate and exploration employees. Each member of the workstream conducted interviews with 2 employees, on an individual basis. This assured the interviewees of confidentiality, with the interviewer asking a series of open ended questions, with approximately 90 minutes each to complete. The interviewers took contemporaneous notes and all responses were acknowledged by the interviewee prior to being submitted to the Human Resources workstream representative for compilation. Individual identification numbers were assigned to the response sheets to ensure anonymity and confidentiality of responses. Following the initial set of interviews, the workstream provided feedback of the findings to all of the employees in the Toronto office. Anyone who had not had the opportunity to provide input was invited to do so by either forwarding an email to anyone of the committee members or could anonymously submit their feedback by depositing the completed feedback sheets in repositories placed throughout the location. An additional 18 responses were received.  Click here to see the interview questions.

The summary of the findings indicated that work/life balance means something different to each person and no "one-size-fits-all" response will meet the needs of the workforce. In addition, a number of employees indicated that they had supportive Managers and work colleagues, however, still didn't feel comfortable with leaving on time because so many of their colleagues remained working into the evening. The fact that the Executive Team worked on weekends, i.e. sending e-mails to colleagues and subordinates left the recipients of the e-mails feeling as though there was an expectation that they, too, should be working and providing responses to these e-mails even though no such expectation had ever been indicated. This clearly was the perception. When asked to rate the morale within the organization, quite a number of the employees used the word "stressed" emphasizing that they thought other employees seemed stressed but they, themselves, were okay.

During these interviews, employees were not only asked to provide feedback on how well the organization was doing with 'work/life balance', but were also asked to provide enhancing behaviours that would improve relationships with Supervisors/Managers and Peers, as well as what they would like to see changed to enhance work/life balance at De Beers Canada. A number of very concrete and helpful ideas were presented. 

As a result of the feedback received, the organization is:

1. Preparing a policy regarding flexible working hours providing employees a basis upon which they can meet with their managers and set up a schedule, addressing both the individual and business needs of the organization;
2. Scheduling time for employees from a variety of disciplines to meet together as a multi-disciplinary team with one member of the Executive team for lunch and talk about issues, concerns and/or successes to help employees feel more engaged.
3. Members of the workstream who worked on this initiative decided to remain intact and follow-up on the results and impact these changes may have had on the organization going forward. 

Evidence of Impacts

Employees expressed gratitude and enthusiasm for having been given the opportunity to provide input into not only impacting, but also changing the culture of the organization. Because we are just at the initial stage of following through on the recommendations, it is too early to fully appreciate the impact this exercise will have. However, from all indications to date, we are confident that this exercise may very well form the model of future employee engagement mechanisms at De Beers Canada. We eagerly look forward to seeing this exercise through to ultimate conclusion.

Having recently conducted an Employee Engagement Survey, September 2010, at the majority of the De Beers operations in Canada and in South Africa, we are fortunate to be able to draw comparisons between the survey results and our findings from the workstream. We are in a fortunate position to be able to draw correlations among the findings and in doing so, can articulate remedies which will simultaneously address the work/life balance improvements along with the required action plans relevant to the survey outcomes.

In any event, we are fortunate to be able to leverage the workstream results in these two effective, progressive and timely ways.

Our next step is implementation of the required actions and in time gleaning from the workforce our measure of success.