“I think of myself as a reformed marketer,” says Stephanie Kramer, L’Oréal North America’s Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO). Kramer is a relative newcomer to HR, having served in a variety of business leadership positions before taking on her current role in 2023. But while she acknowledges the steep learning curve, she also believes the skills and experience she acquired elsewhere in the business allowed her to approach the CHRO role with a fresh perspective.
“Many of my fellow CHROs have been doing this for far longer than I have. But if I had to give them one piece of advice, it would be to think about how they communicate, both within the business and externally,” she says. “When I came into HR, I was blown away by the many amazing things colleagues were doing. But they weren’t always telling people about them.”
To be clear, Kramer is not talking about ”selling” HR to the business in the way that sales and marketing might sell the business’s brand to the public. Rather, she wants CHROs to be more confident in talking about how the function has changed and what that means for the organization going forward.
“We were once the personnel department, but we’re now a strategic partner to the business,” she says. “And we’re empowering individual employees to drive their careers and to manage their working lives, just as we’re all taking more control as consumers elsewhere in our lives.”
For internal audiences, Kramer argues, the challenge is to ensure employees know what is available to them. “We can do incredible things because of the insights we now have from individual employees,” she says. Many employers now use employee feedback, surveys, and analysis to gain a greater understanding of both their needs and those of the business. “We need to communicate with clarity about how we’re building community and how people can control their careers, their development, and their experience at work.”
Kramer points to the fierce competition for talent. “Today, people are taking part in a matching exercise,” she says. “They’re picking the type of organization they want to work with – for their brands, for the rewards, benefits, and opportunities they offer, and for their values. We must communicate who we are and what we stand for.”
Kramer has already begun to act on these imperatives. For example, shortly after she moved into her HR role, L’Oréal launched a new benefits package that the HR function had designed based on feedback from employees. The initial plan was to unveil the changes through a memo to all staff, including a link to a new digital portal designed by the function, but Kramer felt this could fall flat.
“Instead, we set up a town hall meeting for people leaders from across the business, where we talked them through the holistic compensation package for their employees,” she recalls. “We asked those managers to talk to their staff about how they could make full use of the new package. That proved to be a really powerful way to get our messaging across.”
Kramer has also worked hard to establish L’Oréal as an employer of choice for potential candidates. A good example of this is L’Oréal’s Brandstorm competition, which invites 18–30-year-old prospective employees to submit innovative concepts for the company’s consideration. The winning projects receive coaching from L’Oréal’s experts, as well as the opportunity to pitch to the company’s senior leadership teams. The ultimate prize is a job at the business.
“We had 10,000 applicants for the most recent competition, and it’s an amazing external recruitment story, setting out L’Oréal’s stall as a champion of innovation,” Kramer says. “There was also a lot of internal excitement. We picked our judges from across our different brands.”
Kramer also points to L’Oréal’s recent BeautyV3rse convention in New York as an example of the company showcasing its thinking and creativity to an external audience. In both cases,
Kramer’s team has used LinkedIn to talk publicly about the initiatives. “It’s a chance for us to bring the L’Oréal story to life – to talk about what we’re doing in terms of career opportunities, learning and development.”
“Kramer points to a shake-up of the company’s performance review system as an example of how her function is supporting engagement.”
The key to improving communication is consistency, Kramer suggests. But she is also all for mixing things up from time to time.
For example, L’Oréal’s town hall meeting has become an annual fixture, with in-person events held in all its US sites concurrently and live-streamed. The company also holds monthly “salons” – 45-minute virtual sessions typically attended by 600–900 managers. During a salon, Kramer and her colleagues discuss what’s happening with training and upskilling, among other key topics.
“The town hall is a mega moment that pulls everyone together,” she says. “But our salons keep people connected, so that we can set out holistic messaging about what’s important from a cultural standpoint. They cost us nothing, but they enable us to communicate at scale.”
Kramer points to a shake-up of the company’s performance review system as an example of how her function is supporting engagement. While L’Oréal still holds end-of-year reviews for staff, it has introduced quarterly “connect conversations,” at which managers review progress and objectives. “It creates a rhythm,” she explains.
But Kramer sees it as an energizing challenge.
One final shift of emphasis that reflects Kramer’s wider experience in the business is that HR has formalized the way it thinks about the stakeholders and marketplace it serves. “We call it the ‘magic triangle,’” explains Kramer. “The three points of that triangle are HR itself, L’Oréal’s people managers, and its employees. Each is connected to the other.”
Some interactions within the business will involve all three points, Kramer explains, but independent relationships are important too. “The relationship between managers and employees should be possible without our involvement,” she says. “That’s how we develop impact at scale.”
The challenge has never been bigger, Kramer argues. She subscribes to the widely held view that “VUCA world” – characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity – has mutated into “BANI world,” where the future is brittle, anxious, non-linear, and incomprehensible.
In trying to move forward in such an environment, CHROs have an exacting period ahead of them. But Kramer sees it as an energizing challenge. “It has proved to be a fascinating and exciting time to join the HR community,” she says. With this mindset, HR is moving from a support function to being at the core of the business.
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