Strategy Development Insights for Corporate Officers

Shrinking the Great Divide between Strategy and Execution
A Blueprint for Mobilizing Your Workforce

By Bruce Fern

Employee engagement may sound “soft” for many organizations, but for an 8,000 employee, global, high performance technology manufacturer, a more engaged workforce was the critical ingredient to implementing a radically new market strategy.

The corporation built its reputation as a low cost, low margin, high volume manufacturer, known for quality and reliability in each of their markets. In 2003, the company decided to change direction as to a new strategy of being a technology leader and a producer of “high performance” products.

Given what was going on in the marketplace, selling value verses price was clearly the right decision. However, the corporation’s senior management found that executing on the new strategy was more of a challenge then they anticipated. Through this case study, let’s look at a blueprint for mobilizing the workforce.

The Challenge
Many employees challenged the strategy decision itself and questioned whether the organization was moving in the right direction. There was increasing resistance throughout this global organization, in product development, engineering, sales and manufacturing. A once-loyal, dedicated workforce that loved the company and brand was quickly moving toward becoming disengaged.

“We recognized the need to get back on track in 2005 and re-launched a meaningful, relevant leadership curriculum, accelerating the deployment of the company strategy across level, function and geography,” said the Director of their Corporate University.

The solution that was developed reflected a blended learning approach that contained three major elements: an employee engagement survey, an online web course for managers on the company’s new strategy, and employee engagement forums.

Employee Engagement Survey
First, an organization-wide engagement survey was conducted. The survey was designed to measure employees’ understanding of the new strategy, to what levels employees were engaged in the strategy, and to provide an annual metric of “leadership goodness.” They learned 1) some pockets of the organization were not effectively engaged, and 2) managers had difficulty translating the new business strategies into new performance strategies. This survey helped guide the development of go-forward action plans.

Web Course
A foundation web course was designed for managers to build awareness and understanding of the strategy, introduce basic leadership concepts and provide best practices around fostering commitment, managing change and understanding roles and responsibilities.

Engagement Forums
The engagement forums solution focused on giving managers tools and strategies to help employees get fully engaged in their company’s business strategy. The company contracted with an outside expert consulting company that specializes in employee engagement and customer engagement optimization to develop and deliver the employee engagement forums. The forums were rolled out worldwide to managers at every level. Managers left the engagement forums with new found plans for building purpose with their teams around the new strategy, better team accountability for strategy success, and accelerated individual and team behavior change to support the new strategy.

Each forum was customized around the challenges with the new business strategy, unique to each business unit. This was exactly the right prescription for not just treating the symptoms of resistance for each in tact business group, but also addressing the root causes of resistance. The blueprint for mobilizing a worldwide workforce around a new strategy was set. In the engagement forums, managers examined their leadership practices and behaviors that influence the degree to which employees are engaged in the new strategy. As a result of their analyses, the senior managers developed a set of shared values that established individual and team priorities for strategy realization. Additionally there was a new level of team openness and cohesiveness as a result of the forums.

Through several execution tools, the company learned to build and sustain an engaged workforce and drive corporate change by creating a positive workplace that maximizes the value of their team’s contribution.

One of the VPs said, “The blueprint for a blended solution is working as the engagement survey identifies the problem and proposes actions plans, the foundation web course creates awareness and understanding for managers and the forums create acceptance and action.”

Results
The company’s 2007 follow-on engagement survey was completed in the spring. They scored higher in virtually every measure of engagement, with 15 of the 18 business units improving moderately to significantly. The big win, receiving the highest scores, was the gain in employee engagement.

The survey improvements are an important scorecard, but they are not the final measure of engagement. The company’s recent revenues are up 22% over last year as a result of the workforce being fully engaged in the new strategy, and their revenue growth is expected to continue to grow. The company’s gross margin hit an all-time high of 63%, up from 54.7%, accelerating their financial plan by one year. The company has developed a significant number of new products in the new higher profit model, which pave the way for continued growth in revenue and margin. Bruce N. Fern is an ECG Senior Consultant and President of Performance Connections International, Inc. (PCI) which specializes in engaging employees in strategy through PCI’s Leading for Employee Engagement™ forums. Please feel free to contact Bruce at bruce@EverChangeGroup.com.

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