How Boeing is building the future

Heidi B Capozzi is Senior Vice President of Human Resources at The Boeing Company. Speaking to us in the latest Hays Journal, she explains how a collaborative culture and a committed diversity strategy are steering the organisation into the future.

While there are plenty of good reasons to join an industry-leading company, ultimately it was the culture that attracted Heidi B Capozzi to her current role as Senior Vice President of Human Resources at The Boeing Company.

“Our people have such an intense passion and commitment for the mission of this company, and the work that we do,” she says of the organisation’s 150,000-plus employees. “I am privileged to work alongside some of the best talent in the world, and I’m proud of the way we harness that talent by working collaboratively as one team.”

She says this collaborative culture stems from the knowledge all employees have of the company’s history. From helping to send astronauts to the Moon to revolutionising commercial air travel multiple times, Boeing has been at the forefront of the aerospace industry for over a century. However, Capozzi says it is the collective understanding of where the company is going that cements the pride employees have in their work.

“You can look through the past 100 years of aerospace and recognise the incredible influence that Boeing has had in the world,” she explains. “Then you think about our mission going forward, which is to connect, protect, explore and inspire the world through aerospace innovation. There aren’t many companies that can claim to do that.”

Boosting diversity across Boeing

Boeing has a lofty history and a purposeful path ahead, and one of the keys to its long-term growth is its workforce. But, like many companies that require a large number of STEM specialists, building a diverse workforce can be difficult. Capozzi says that to tackle this, Boeing leaders are taking a hands-on approach.

“Diversity and inclusion are enduring values that we hold as a company. Our senior leadership team meets regularly to guide our diversity and inclusion strategy and assess progress.

“As part of our strategy to develop and attract STEM specialists, Boeing has established strong links with schools and universities to introduce students from all backgrounds to STEM and the company, in the hope of securing future talent for the business and the wider industry.

“There are plenty of things we can do to improve diversity at Boeing,” she continues, “and we can boost our efforts by partnering with organisations like the US National Science Foundation to drive interest in STEM fields and expand the talent pool.”

How to retain talent

The company is also taking steps to retain diverse talent. The company offers a range of benefits – some of them unique – that Capozzi believes will further improve representation in its workforce.

“We have an industry-leading tuition assistance programme that provides up to US$25,000 a year for employees to pursue degrees beyond what they have today,” she says. “We also offer mentoring programmes, reverse mentoring programmes, on-the-job training, rotational assignments and a variety of other opportunities to help employees continue to learn and grow within our organisation.

“We work to provide benefits, leave policies, training and development practices that support a diverse workforce. At the start of this year, for example, we rolled out 12 weeks of paid parental leave as part of our evolving total rewards strategy.”

Offering employees a clear career path

With this much effort going into building a diverse workforce, it’s perhaps no surprise that Boeing is also heavily invested in retaining and developing future leaders. One of the core behaviours the company encourages is empowering colleagues.

“We rolled out a new Boeing Behaviours framework, which is all about creating the culture we need to accelerate performance, and one of the behaviours is: Invest in our team and empower each other.”

Having spent her entire career in HR, Capozzi has extremely broad knowledge of best practice in the role. However, this is an area she is particularly close to. Prior to taking on her current role, she led Boeing’s Leadership Centre, a programme that the company believes will help it continue to flourish far into the future.

“The Boeing Leadership Centre is a space for leaders from across our enterprise, as well as some of our suppliers and customers, to come together and focus on leadership development. We serve all levels of leadership in that regard,” she explains.

“The centre is part of our strategy to ensure that we are growing and building a pipeline of future leaders for the company.”

Developing employees at all levels

And it’s not just leaders that benefit from training and investment. In June 2018, Capozzi announced the company would be spending US$100 million on workforce development. In looking for ideas about how this money could be used, the organisation asked employees to make suggestions. To some organisations, even a few hundred ideas might be a good response: Boeing received over 40,000 suggestions from its employees.

But why were its people so responsive? “It’s something people care about: their own development and improving their ability to contribute to the company,” says Capozzi. “Our employees want to be involved in shaping their environment and their futures.

“Most importantly, they believed that we would listen to what they told us they wanted, which was modern, accessible learning, opportunities to upskill in technical areas or in areas that are disrupted by technology, and more support for first-line leaders.”

Capozzi says that this confidence from the company’s employees is justified. It has already begun rolling out some of the ideas, such as the Boeing Digital Campus, a collection of online education resources hosted by Degreed.com. The site provides resources and certification classes for employees who wish to learn new skills relevant to their work. Capozzi says the uptake has been incredible: “More than 30,000 employees are registered and actively learning in this new forum.”

Putting an emphasis on social responsibility

Capozzi is also a great believer in the importance of organisations giving back to those outside of their business – something Boeing takes very seriously. She says that a focus on corporate social responsibility, while certainly beneficial to worthy causes outside of the organisation, also pays dividends in terms of employee engagement.

“Social responsibility is the right thing to do, but it’s also very good for our business,” she explains. “It’s very important to the talent pipeline that we seek to attract and retain people who believe in giving back and investing in our collective future.”

The organisation focuses on three areas to engage with the communities it operates in. The first is ‘Our future’, under which Boeing’s partnerships with educational institutes fall. This outreach in particular aims to grow diverse STEM talent pools for the future.

“The second area, ‘Our heroes’, is our commitment to veterans and their families,” Capozzi continues. “We support them through their transition from military service into the civilian workforce.

“And the third area, ‘Our home’, is about supporting the communities where we live and work.”

She says the company understands how important charitable giving is to its employees, and looks for ways to help them do more.

“For example, we just had the opportunity, on the back of company savings from US tax reform, to enhance the work that we’re doing in community engagement by increasing the employer match that we provide to participants in our Employees Community Fund, an employee-owned and -operated community fund contributing to thousands of non-profit organisations.”

The future of Boeing

While employee development and engagement is hugely important for the company, Boeing has also needed to be constantly conscious of staying ahead in a fast-developing industry.

“Innovation has been the life-blood of this company for more than 100 years now,” says Capozzi. “Right now, we’re creating commercial aeroplanes like the 777X that have folding wing tips. We’re developing rockets to take us into deep space, and we’re working on new technology to accelerate underwater exploration.

“We know the opportunity for future innovation is greater than ever – that’s why we invest several billion dollars in research and development annually.”

Boeing also sets clear goals to guide it in the immediate future. “We’ve defined our goals for 2025, and in that timeframe we want to be not just the best aerospace company in the world, but a global industrial champion,” she says.

But with such diverse talent needs across the business, how do Capozzi and her team set a central strategy that works across the many sectors Boeing operates in?

“As an HR team, we asked ourselves, ‘Are we equipped today to fuel a global industrial champion?’ Our answer was, ‘Not as well equipped as we should be,’ and so we launched a pretty significant transformation for our function focusing on our business model, simplifying our HR processes and implementing new HR technologies.”

Supporting talent across the business

She says that by changing how the HR team works at Boeing, they have already made significant steps forward in building a recruitment strategy that works across the organisation.

“We have really strong collaboration between the businesses and the support functions, and our HR team understands the skills we’re going to need to serve the business in the future.

“We’re making sure our talent acquisition and HR capabilities can be effectively deployed across the enterprise to add value.”

While Capozzi has a clear passion for where the Boeing team is heading together, she also recognises the need to set personal goals. With this in mind, what does she hope to achieve during her time in this role?

“It’s important for all of us to think about how we can make things better than we found them,” she concludes. “One of my goals is to build on the work of my predecessors in terms of creating a world-class HR function.”

This blog was originally written as part of the Hays Journal.

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