We use cookies to ensure that the website works as intended and to collect statistics on its use so that we can improve your web site experience.

×

4 tips from Norway's leading HR team

Blog overview

Recently recognized by Finn.no as Norway’s best Human Resources department, our small, but now award-winning HR team works tirelessly to ensure our working environment is almost as engaging and dynamic as the people working in it.

Driven by passionate and motivated colleagues, 82% of which consider what they do for a living their passion, rather than just a job, means we have thought a little differently when it comes to HR.

Knowledge is power

For example, communication within organisations tends to be hierarchical, for all but the most important announcements, with information rarely accessible to all employees. We wanted to change that.

Setting up monthly ONE meetings, financial results and ongoing projects across the entire organization are presented to everyone in the company. In addition, monthly breakfast meetings, where individual departments discuss their work and ongoing plans are also shared via Webinar, so all of Aker BioMarine can participate. The final step, was sharing the agendas and details from management meetings via Facebook’s Workplace so all our employees can keep up with the company’s progress and ambitions.   

 

New hires, new communication tools

Along with communicating business, strategic and operational information across our entire company, we believe it is vital that new appointments are introduced and acclimatized into our organisation as quickly and seamlessly as possible. 

To make this a reality new employees introduce themselves on Facebook’s Workplace by answering four questions (background, the main reason why you chose to work in Aker BioMarine, 3 words summarizing your personality and share one thing about yourself that will surprise your colleagues). Supporting this initiative, as standard we encourage all our colleagues to share information about their working day via the Workplace app.   

 

New call-to-action

 

Supporting our people in doing their best 

We believe that everyone want to do as best a job as they can. Our employee performance management process challenges the traditional focus of evaluating performance and ranking employees. Rather, our software tool facilitates a good discussion and dialogue between the employee and manager with evaluation questions such as: “How well does Aker BioMarine recognize my value?” “What would have the greatest impact on my ability to do my best work more often?” “How can my manager best support me in my role and development?” “What are my strengths?” and “What are my improvement areas?” These questions support our managers in having good dialogues with honest feedback focused on developing our employees.  

 

Read more: How to attract, foster and build talent? 

 

Embracing new technologies

Reflecting the dynamism of our company, HR is constantly looking to challenge the established norms, introducing new ways of working and embracing new technologies if they can increase the company’s agility and efficiency. We have two new digital HR tools which have done just that.

BambooHR, the cloud-based HR system, was adopted and it has drastically simplified the recruitment process, the onboarding of new employees and absence reporting. Reducing the focus on characterization and the categorization of employees, the new system supports individual goals, self-assessment and managerial evaluation.


The engagement app &frankly has completely changed how we measure employee engagement. Engagement level and drivers are measured in various questionnaires (recognition, autonomy at work, link between own job and company mission and results, self-development). Questions go out once a month, with the same question asked at 6 months intervals. The results are available to all employees and are discussed in each department, so any improvement initiatives come from the grassroots level. 

 

Read more: How to foster growth culture based on trust, transparency and freedom? 

 

Offer accepted

Prizes aside, the ongoing success of our HR work can be measured by the engagement of our employees, the results they deliver and of course the desirability of our company to talented people looking for a new challenge. So, we are incredibly proud that despite the fact that Aker BioMarine is a relatively unknown company, those who are in parallel recruitment processes consistently say that we are their first choice

Aker Biomarine Brand Book