Disclosure on Management Approach - Development of Human Capital

The changes of the last few years have profoundly modified the features of our organization, which in little more than five years has become a multinational present in 23 countries, with more than 50% of its employees citizens of a country other than Italy.
With the acquisition of Endesa, the “impetuous” growth abroad, which characterized the last four years, practically came to an end and a new phase – focused on the consolidation and integration of the different companies that now make up the Group – began.
In this situation, the Personnel and Organization Department will perform the crucial role of aligning the values and cultures of the Enel people, ensuring not only the achievement of business objectives, but also a style of relating to both the internal and the external community that is up to the sustainability ambitions and commitments established by the Company, all the while respecting local specificities.
In other words, the Department must establish and implement policies aimed at the construction of a work environment that is intent on results, but also attentive to the involvement of people and the quality of the relationship that individuals and different professional groups have with the Company. For the Department, this means developing a new way of doing and thinking to help people feel less and less “employees” and more and more “citizens” of Enel, able to combine their prospects and expectations with the growth of the Company, within a framework of overall sustainability.
At Enel, this ambition is transformed into concrete strategies and initiatives.
First of all, the repeated concern for safety issues – which for Enel means tirelessly pursuing the achievable goal of “zero injuries” – not only for Enel employees, but for all the people who come into contact with the Company, both as suppliers and through other relations. This renewed commitment is shown by the fact that the Enel Leadership Model – whose use will be extended in the assessment processes of 2010, involving more than 50% of the Company’s people – was expressly revised in 2009 to make the safety issue explicit and codify it in specific behavior.
The next step will be to extend the concept of workplace health from meaning an absence of injuries, disease, or discomfort to meaning physical and mental well-being.
Then, a great willingness to listen: the Climate Survey, which is carried out every other year, furnishes what could be called the organization’s “temperature” and inspires future actions. More than 1,000 actions of improvement were conceived and implemented at the local level in 2009, to which must be added the trans-Group projects.
The dissemination of multiculturalism and the development of global capabilities are clearly other important matters that the Company will continue to work on in the immediate future to support the consolidation and multinational integration of Enel.
In this perspective, knowledge management takes on special importance.
In the first place, Enel University offers a number of technical and functional courses, with both internal and external instructors, aimed at defining key knowledge and developing and disseminating it widely.
In the second place, in 2009 the Company launched the second Enel-Endesa Performance Improvement Program, part of which is dedicated specifically to Best-Practice Sharing. The four areas in which our efforts will be concentrated initially are: conventional thermal production, distribution, sales, and nuclear production. Eighteen work groups, involving about 125 people in six countries, have been set up, and – for those areas where there is the greatest value from an exchange of information – mixed work groups to identify the best operating practices and establish action plans to implement them in situations different from those in which they were developed.
Finally, with regard to support systems for knowledge exchange, two important platforms were planned and launched: the “Global Intranet”, which – in addition to being conceived to reach all the Group’s countries – was also enhanced by a number of web 2.0 collaboration functions, and the ”Enel Learning System”, in which online courses and study material are available.
The key words are thus: places for listening and reflection, safety and well-being, multiculturalism, diversity, and knowledge management and sharing. Enel’s Personnel Department puts them at the center of its actions, with the goal of connecting its histories and cultures in a new multinational dimension, without forgetting the potential contribution these actions may give rise to for the systems in the countries where Enel is present in terms of social impacts and effects on employment, at a time when the financial situation risks influencing the growth prospects of all the players concerned.