IKEA adopted a paternalistic stance toward employees and their needs (as did many other Swedish companies) and promoted employee empowerment. However, although the company had a positive HR philosophy and offered generous benefits, their application was more or less standardized and policies applied uniformly to all employees.
This did not always work well, as different employees had different needs. In the late 1990s, when Spiers-Lopez became the HR head at IKEA North America, she realized that employees were not able to derive the maximum benefit from IKEA's generous HR policies, as the policies did not always match individual needs and requirements. She felt that employees would benefit more if there were a greater amount of flexibility in benefits administration...