Tapestry's Approach to Employee Growth and Wellbeing

Jul 5, 2022 12:20 PM ET

Originally published in Tapestry's 2021 Corporate Responsibility Report

We want our employees to love where they work. To create this positive environment, we uphold a culture that strives to improve work-life balance and the wellbeing of our employees. By investing in learning and development, we are strengthening our company and building and supporting future leaders.

LISTENING TO OUR EMPLOYEES

Our approach to employee listening is focused on helping us become more agile, data driven and customer-centric around employee surveys. This evolved approach includes a shift from a single annual comprehensive engagement survey with in-depth action planning, towards multiple, smaller surveys and continuous action-taking. Our goal is to understand our employees’ experiences and needs by checking in with them more frequently. In addition, we aim to empower People Managers to make more responsive, meaningful decisions for their teams. We also include our EI&D index in all our surveys, providing leaders and managers with real-time, up-to-date feedback. With these insights, our leadership can identify areas for improvement and target ways to increase a sense of belonging on their teams.

We are implementing more frequent surveys with varied content, and by doing so, we are able to draw connections between behaviors and drive and sustain positive change. We use survey insights to refresh our development programming and offer targeted skill-building, business learning and exposure for employees at all career stages. We also use surveys to measure critical moments in an employee’s life cycle such as onboarding and exit.

LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT

In FY2021, we adapted our learning and development strategy to better fit the needs and expectations of our leadership and employee groups. We found that real-time and relevant development support is critical to employee growth.

Key FY2021 Learning and Development highlights include:

  • Change and Transition Support: To help our leaders and team members navigate the rapidly changing external and internal environment, we offered large-scale, virtual open-enrollment workshops covering 2 topics:
    • Leading Through Adversity: Equipped leadership with tools to navigate uncertainty and change in the workplace
    • Navigating Change: Supported leadership, corporate and store team members in the disruptive business environment by providing tools and resources to optimize productivity
  • Better Conversations Every Day: Facilitated by the Center for Creative Leadership, this workshop focused on leadership coaching behaviors applied to real workplace challenges to help build trust, fuel collaboration and support better business outcomes. As a follow-up to the workshop, participants also engaged in 30-60- 90-day check-ins to support their development. Nearly 90% of our global senior leadership team participated.
  • Coaching Culture in China: All Directors and Senior Leaders in Greater China attended ‘leader as coach’ training. We provided opportunities to apply this training to the employees’ daily work. All participants then attended a coaching fair to match each senior leader with a mentee within Tapestry. In the future, we aim to expand these trainings throughout our operations in Asia.
  • ESG/Sustainability Learning Sessions: Tapestry’s ESG and Sustainability Team partnered with the Design Studio Management Team to host weekly learning sessions on various climate-related topics, including: climate change, waste, circularity, design for the environment (DFE), plastics and recycling, sustainability philosophy, UN SDGs, materials, systems thinking, and regenerative agriculture. These sessions took place over 11 weeks and were offered to our product and materials development teams. The recorded sessions were then circulated to our employee base through our internal intranet.
  • Emerging Leaders Program: We launched our fourth cohort of this one-year development program that aims to accelerate the growth of our global mid-level leaders. Historically, this program was nomination-based. In FY2021, we changed our approach by opening the program to applications from Directors and Senior Directors. By doing so, we intended to increase the program’s visibility and encourage people to have career and development conversations with their managers. We received positive feedback on this approach. During reunion meetings, past participants shared the enduring impact of their program experience and highlighted their improved self-awareness, relationship-building and leadership skills.
  • Senior Leader Transition Accelerator: We designed and launched this program in FY2020 to help senior leaders who are transitioning into new roles navigate the responsibilities and expectations of their new positions. Based on positive feedback from the first 3 cohorts we continue to offer this program to our teams.
  • The Common Thread: The Common Thread is Tapestry’s global People Manager development program that teaches proven leadership techniques. It is founded on the belief that great leadership has a multiplying effect. In FY2021, we launched new topics for virtual learning, including Emotional Intelligence and Strategic Thinking, and for our corporate teams, Empowering Innovation. These 3 topics emphasize our focus on remaining agile as an organization, developing strong team relationships and employing strategic thinking in all areas of our business. We also developed a supplemental tool called the Roadmap to help employees navigate and employ The Common Thread resources to achieve their individual goals and desired outcomes. In addition, we introduced resources to help equip new People Managers with foundational skill building as they transition from being individual contributors to leaders. This included an Introduction to People Management learning session, an onboarding guide for new People Managers, and self- development tools around topics like Delegation, Building Relationships, Growth Mindset, Giving Feedback and Prioritization.

INCLUSION@TAPESTRY

Inclusion@Tapestry aims to build inclusive teams and environments through live and virtual trainings. In FY2021, we launched our Inclusion@Tapestry program for our EU workforce and initiated inclusion trainings for our Asia employees.

  • Inclusion@Tapestry in the EU: We hosted live, instructor-led trainings as well as eLearning opportunities that included participation from 85% of corporate People Managers and 97% of Store Managers.
  • Inclusion@Tapestry in Asia: We focused on generating EI&D support from executive and senior leaders in Asia and initiated inclusion education with all employees at the Director level and above. In FY2022, we plan to introduce our Asia Inclusion Council and implement inclusion training, workshops and initiatives for corporate and Asia store employees.

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