Toyota Motor Europe: Building a happier workplace by putting people first

A company keen to adopt a new approach

Since it was established in 1937, Toyota has become a household name across the world and a byword for quality, efficiency and innovation in car manufacturing space. More recently, that space has expanded into mobility more broadly.

Its European arm, Toyota Motor Europe (TME) is headquartered in Belgium and operates in 29 European countries, employing some 25,000 people. “We have over 69 nationalities working in TME, so it’s a very international company,” says Slabbinck.

“Organizationally too, there are different cultures,” she adds. “You have the sales area where there is a specific culture, and then the manufacturing plants where there is a huge emphasis on efficiency. It's great to have these different mentalities, this diversity; gender-wise, nationality-wise, but also organizationally. That's what makes it really interesting to work here.”

Slabbinck’s Business Productivity team focuses on supporting employees across the TME network to embrace new ways of working, especially how they use digital tools. “Our team mission is to increase user adoption of the Microsoft 365 digital workplace,” she explains. That user adoption spans the whole suite of Microsoft 365 tools, including Teams, SharePoint and Outlook.

But the adoption approach isn’t just using tech for tech’s sake. “One of the key principles that drives our approach is including the user voice,” she says.

“We really try to get close to our users, and bridge the human gap,” she adds. “I’d say we’re pioneers in that.”

Accelerating adoption during COVID-19

Using digital tools to enhance productivity and collaboration is not a new pursuit for Toyota. The company was an early adopter of cloud-based tools and was already planning to move to something akin to a hybrid workplace in 2019.

“The company had just announced we would be working remotely two days a week,” recalls Slabbinck. “So we were busy preparing for that, getting everything in place, when COVID-19 happened.” 

What had previously been a strategic decision to embrace remote working, suddenly became a necessity. “We had daily crisis meetings because we weren't too sure what was going to happen,” she recalls. “We'd never had that many people working from home before.” 

And while the early days were focused on ensuring firewalls could support the new setup and the basics were covered, the team quickly turned their attention to the wellbeing of TME employees. “We did regular surveys together with HR on how people were feeling using Microsoft Forms,” Slabbinck says. “And the surveys were about more than just IT. We used smiley faces for people to tell us how they were feeling, how happy they were. It was very important for us to understand that in the beginning. 

The team also realized that there was much more openness to some of the tools. “There had been some resistance pre-pandemic to SharePoint and even Teams. But suddenly, people changed their mindset and realized how useful they are. It gave us a lot of momentum to drive user adoption. 

“That was when we started to do some really interesting things with our partner Rapid Circle,” she adds. “In our plants, for example, it was crucial during the pandemic to keep the presence on the shopfloor. Through Teams video meetings on a mobile phone with a stabilizer, the meeting attendees felt like they were on the shopfloor, even if they weren’t. 

“And we found that the live Teams meetings with video enabled faster sharing of best practices to a larger audience, so it was even an improvement from before.”

Improving the way people collaborate 

The team at TME had already established a strategy to encourage user adoption of Microsoft 365 tools before the pandemic happened.

“The strategy had a few important pillars,” explains Slabbinck. “One of those was ‘digital influencers’. The influencers existed before COVID, but they weren’t particularly active,” says Michiel Dröge, Business Consultant at Microsoft partner Rapid Circle. “So that was one of the areas we wanted to improve.” 

To do this, they used Microsoft SharePoint to establish a broader community. “We established the Know It community, a portal on Teams and SharePoint where people can find key information about the Microsoft 365 tools with FAQ's and videos,” says Slabbinck. “It’s a space for employees to ask questions and for our digital influencers to contribute and guide people.”

“We used Microsoft reporting tools to look at data from users and the influencers, to think of ways to enhance engagement,” says Dröge. “That’s how we came up with the webinar program, and got the insights to improve some of the sites where we publish information.” 

“One webinar series was focused on My Analytics, which we launched during the pandemic,” says Katarzyna Slomka, Business Productivity Specialist at TME, who led the webinar series. “There was that need to support people to focus their time, to understanding their own working style. 

“We made everything clearer for people, more streamlined,” adds Dröge. “And that is helping people to start to use new tools. Many employees have started using Teams together with Planner, for example. And they’re finding that Planner really helps them to visualize their tasks and work in a new, more agile way.”

Bridging the space between IT and HR

An important aspect of the way that Toyota Motor Europe is using technology, is seeing it not in isolation, but as part of a wider organizational transformation. “There are a lot of initiatives that Toyota has been doing that are connected to IT support,” says Dröge. “But we want to relate them to broader HR themes around change management, to focus on really making people happier and secure with their workplace and supporting them to collaborate in better ways.” 

“We are transforming from a car company to a Digital Mobility provider,” says Kylie Jimenez, Senior Vice President of People, Technology and Corporate Affairs at Toyota Motor Europe. 

“This transformation is about creating products, systems and services to produce mass happiness for all. Not just for Toyota customers, but for the good of society. While some of this is hardwired into Toyota DNA, there is an aspect of cultural transformation that is still required.   

“This has brought our IT&D, HR and Administrative functions closer to focus on collaboration, open sharing and innovation. Together we aim to inspire and enable the change for the organization by painting a picture of what is possible and then enabling it with the right digital workplace tools and resources.”

And as the company pivots to a new era, it is keen to invite its employees to redefine how the changing working environment can improve and facilitate the way the company collaborates. Ideas are being called for on how meeting rooms are refurbished and a series of workshops has been organized to ‘hack the future of collaboration at TME.’ The best ideas gathered from the workshops will be pitched to senior staff at TME and funded, as the company transitions to a new way of working that straddles physical and virtual spaces. 

A new mindset for the hybrid workplace