Prioritising worker engagement and well-being
What to know
We're developing and scaling programmes that enhance engagement, increase compensation and create opportunities for career advancement for women.
We believe that a skilled, valued and engaged workforce is key for growth and sustainability, and we want to empower suppliers to engage with and value their people because we know that high employee engagement leads to a more efficient, agile and committed workforce, which results in beneficial outcomes for both the individual and the organisation.
Not only are engaged workers more likely to feel physically and mentally secure, but they're also more likely to actively and positively contribute to their work. Having an engaged workforce is proven to fundamentally shift overarching business issues such as compensation, overtime and workplace conditions.
Over the past five years, we developed and implemented the Engagement and Well-being (EWB) Survey to measure the level of engagement and experiences of factory workers. While we have been scaling the deployment of this survey to reach more factories across our supply chain, measuring worker voice is just the start. We are actively supporting our suppliers in building capabilities that will increase engagement, and this approach is foundational to a future where we continue to grow with those factories that value and engage workers.
We bring pragmatic, evidence-based and measurable practices to our suppliers to increase engagement, and have set an ambitious target for 2025. By 2025, we expect 100% of our strategic suppliers to be measuring and improving the engagement of the people making our products.
We've set this target because we believe an engaged workforce is one where people are valued and want to positively contribute. In addition, the work environment must be physically and emotionally safe, with management actively striving to create that safe environment.
To achieve this target, we're focusing our work in three key areas.
Our goal is to reach 100% of our strategic suppliers. The more suppliers that we can reach, the better the grasp we'll have of the whole industry and the more likely it is that we'll be able to change for the better.
We developed the Engagement and Well-being (EWB) Survey to measure engagement based on the experiences of individuals working in factories. The EWB Survey highlights areas where employees already feel supported and engaged, and helps identify opportunities for factory management to improve employee engagement.
The survey was extensively piloted and tested, in collaboration with suppliers and other organisations, to ensure the results were statistically relevant, actionable and successfully painted a comprehensive picture of the current status of engagement in a facility.
Recognising that no two suppliers are the same or at the same point in their worker-engagement and well-being journey, we plan to meet them where they are. Nike's guidelines drive a standardised approach and enable supplier ownership and accountability in this process. We have a robust network of vendors which leverage mobile and tablet technology to deploy these surveys digitally, enabling rapid feedback on results and more potential to integrate into their worker-management communication systems.
We will continue to evolve tools and advance capabilities to help suppliers in converting the insights from their EWB Survey into actions that positively impact workers. These include supports such as the EWB Action Planning Guide, which helps factories develop and implement a process for converting these insights from workers into action and embedding these practices into their human-resource management (HRM) systems.
Measuring engagement is just the start. We support our suppliers in building capabilities that will increase engagement. By focusing on increasing worker-management communications; investing in strategic human-resource management and lean-management frameworks; elevating a culture of safety; and employing a valued-worker-centric view to programme implementation, worker engagement will increase and businesses will thrive.
In addition, we see value in collaborating with other like-minded companies to create and distribute tools and programmes that build worker engagement and well-being.