Abstract

The case study ‘L’Oréal’s FIT Culture App: A Culture Acclimatization Tool’ deals with L’Oréal’s efforts to integrate new employees into the company and its culture. In 2005, L’Oréal, developed a comprehensive on-boarding “Follow-Up and Integration Track (FIT)” program. This was a formal integration/induction program designed to help new employees learn to adapt to its culture. To better support and onboard its new employees all over the world and align itself with the digital learning trends of millennial employees, the company developed the Fit Culture App in 2017. The app was designed to assist its newcomers understand the unique company culture and key values through challenges, personal stories, and videos and was made available in 11 languages. It was the world’s first mobile application designed to assist newcomers in an organization understand, decode, and master their unique company culture. The app had bite-sized capsules of content on topics such as entrepreneurship, cooperation, agility, and networking. New employees needed to use the app for 5-10 minutes daily and were able to familiarize themselves with L’Oréal’s culture in 30 days as the entire content of the app was learner-driven. The case also describes how the app was paired with other culture-focused initiatives within L’Oréal’s learning eco-system such as the ‘Simplicity transformation program’ that included seminars designed to share the culture with executives and managers; the ‘Lead & Enable program’, where managers learned to help employees grow and encourage them to take the initiative; and the ‘L’Oréal Momentum program’ that provided opportunities for managers to reflect on how they could build a new, community-driven and more collaborative L’Oréal. These culture-focused initiatives helped L’Oréal rank 12th among the top 30 in the view of business students and 19th position among the top 30 in the view of engineering/IT students, as per the World’s Most Attractive Employers (WMAE) research for 2019 undertaken by Universum.

Learning Objectives

The case is structured to achieve the following Learning Objectives:

• Understand the importance of integrating new employees into a company’s culture.
• Gain knowledge on the process of socialization.
• Understand the relevance of induction and different employee training methods.
• Importance of effective induction to curb employee turnover.
• Examining the need for employee training.

Keywords

L’Oréal; Organizational culture; Onboarding; Employee training; Employee engagement; Socialization; On-the-job training; Fit Culture App