Symantec praises employees with Applause scheme

Symantec has acquired numerous businesses over the years.

And one of the main challenges it’s faced from an HR perspective is merging the different organisational cultures together into a unified whole.

Speaking on the second day of the HR Technology conference in Paris, Jennifer Lepird, Director - Total Rewards at Symantec, says: “There are some legendary stories across the company of employees from Symantec showing up in their yellow shirts, and employees from an acquired company showing up in their red shirts. You can imagine when you’re trying to have successful integration how distracting that can be.”

One of the ways the cybersecurity business tried to integrate the different cultures is through its recognition programme, Applause. The programme was designed to make it easy for employees to thank one another for demonstrating core values and, according to Lepird, it has helped break down barriers in newly formed teams. But, even though the scheme was immediately successful and employees embraced it from the start, the HR team has had to justify the cost of the programme when budgets were tight.