Completed projects
Workforce Vitality
A vital, healthy workforce is good for business, peoples and society. So, what are the barriers to the provision and uptake of effective programmes?
Building on the successful Win4Youth programme, this project aims to create a new paradigm of what a good employer does to make the global workforce holistically healthy and fit for purpose. It is not an app, not a platform, but a combination of policy, practice, culture, environment, technology & tools to create stickiness.
It employs the social innovation lab methodology of rigorous research and design thinking, culminating in a prototype of a product, service or way of doing business that has both social value and business potential. Initial research by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) fuelled a series of co-creation workshops with a multistakeholder working group, facilitated by design thinking expert John Kembel of d.global out of the d.school at Stanford University.
The end result is a blueprint for how institutions can more effectively approach workforce vitality in a holistic, sustainable, embedded way. It hinges on a set of necessary elements to create a truly enabling, human-centric environment. Employee wellbeing has never been more critical. At the time when the world of work is changing at the speed of light and workers are under immense pressure due to COVID-19, businesses should invest more time and effort to ensure their employees are engaged and healthy.
Current projects
A design thinking methodology is at the core of all we do – with end-users’ needs at the heart of it all. These are the current projects which the Innovation Foundation team is hard at work developing.
CEO for One Month
Experience Work Day
Portfolio Career
Supporting Work Readiness
Giving young talent a chance
Many young people struggle to find a way into work because they lack the experience and skills that companies look for. Through CEO for One Month and Experience Work Day, we give young people hands-on experience to help them to get a foot on the career ladder and prepare for success
CEO for One Month
The CEO of tomorrow will be quite different from the CEO of today. Both have much to learn from each other. Our aim is to find creative, innovative leaders among today’s youth and offer them the career opportunity of a lifetime: the chance to spend 24/7x 30 days with Adecco Group CEO, Alain Dehaze. It starts at local level, where 47 young women and men are selected to shadow the Adecco CEOs in their home countries. After rigorous assessment and a gruelling boot camp, only one of the 47 will be chosen as Global CEO for One Month and start his or her journey with Alain. In 2018, we received more than 204,000 initial applications for the programme. But the value is not only for those who make it to the final round. All applicants receive information, tools and support that will help them move from the world of education to the world of work.
Supporting Work Readiness
Giving young talent a chance
Many young people struggle to find a way into work because they lack the experience and skills that companies look for. Through CEO for One Month and Experience Work Day, we give young people hands-on experience to help them to get a foot on the career ladder and prepare for success
Experience Work Day
Hands-on work experience is vital in today’s labour market, and young people are often excluded. On Experience Work Day, offices across the Adecco Group open our doors to thousands of young people, inviting them to work alongside us to learn from our experts. In 2018, Experience Work Day gave more than 7,000 young people in 46 countries the chance to see the business from the inside, thanks to 4,200 Adecco Group mentors.
Building skills to aid career transition
Leveraging the expertise and methodology of the Athlete Career Programme, this innovation project aims to unlock hidden pools of talent by increasing the employability of people who come out of narrow fields of study or training, who often struggle with career transition.
Two pilots are already running:
Employability for young musicians: Partnering with the Lucerne Festival and Davos Festival, we have piloted career development workshops for young musicians in the context of festival academies. Following on from this success, we are building out a multi-year project to extend this to academic institutions to create systemic change regarding how musicians are prepared for the world of work.
Disability inclusion in emerging markets: Partnering with the Physical Rehabilitation Programme (PRP) of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), we aim to increase the employability of people with disabilities in developing countries, fragile states and conflict zones. We have piloted a train-the-trainer programme for ICRC Inclusion Officers to disseminate tools and methods for preparing people with disabilities for work.
Following the same methodology as the Vitality project, Portfolio Career employs design thinking and co-creation of solutions with consortium partners. The end result will be a replicable model that can be applied to other underserved populations.
Related programmes within the Adecco Group
Athlete Programmes
Created in partnership with the International Olympic and Paralympic Committees, the Athlete Programmes help elite athletes, with and without impairments, to build job skills and transition successfully into post-sport careers. The programme offers training, guidance, mentorship and hands-on work experience. Since its inception, the programme has supported more than 40,000 athletes from over 185 countries.
Win4Youth
Supporting Workforce Vitality
Harnessing the power of sport to change lives
Win4Youth inspires Adecco Group employees, associates and clients to live an active and healthy life by engaging in sports. The model is simple: log your time or kilometers spent doing your favourite sports, and raise money for programmes that help young people around the world to be work-ready. This popular programme already engages over 22,000 of our 34,000 employees. Including associates and clients, in 2017, nearly 50,000 participants logged more than 7.3 million kilometres. This resulted in a total donation of 500,000 CHF. From 2018, we are pleased to work with Plan International as our Global Charity Partner. Our donation will support their current work and we will collaborate on new solutions to global youth unemployment.
Sustainability
As a multinational company and leader in our industry, we fully embrace sustainability at the heart of our work. We have a duty to ensure that environmental, social and governance (ESG) policies and practices are mainstreamed across the company and are integral to how we do business.
