In 2020, we initiated an organizational challenge that started with a new global organizational model. The plan was put in place with a lot of enthusiasm from all the leaders. It was centered around models that facilitated fitter and faster operations and decision making. It also created a lot of uncertainty for most employees, who were trying to understand their new role among other things. It was during those moments of change when Covid-19 hit.
Since we received the challenge in the Consumer Business Group in Latin America, we were convinced that we could make an impact and challenge the status quo. We identified some early challenges, like that the team felt like a non-prioritized business compared to the other industrial businesses of the company. There was a need to change that perception and make the consumer business more attractive in order to find, develop and retain the best talent to grow the business.
With the leaders of the Consumer Business group in Latin America, we believe in going above and beyond to support our customers, our communities, and one another. We defined that the way we would challenge the status quo was by establishing the right culture, that would allow us to have the best and strongest team. People who were willing to care, to take responsibility, to be resilient and to lead.
In April 2020 we created our People and Culture program and called it “Time to Lead."
The value proposition we defined is: "Leadership is a decision. Leadership is a choice. We expect our team to take responsibility for their own leadership, to take action and risk enough to make a difference. We also expect them to care for others, so they can perform at their best in their current role, accelerate their growth and create value as one great team."
Part of our focus was to try to understand how the teams were doing and identify the top priorities to ensure the new organizational model’s success. We analyzed our team, what the potential risk of losing talent was, and what the retention and engagement drivers were.
I personally had one on one meetings with the leaders with the purpose of identifying the level of engagement, and to explore different career possibilities, and development needs. Moreover, we also sat down with several companies to gain a better understanding of the best practices in the market.
In a context of pandemics, the virtual mode of the workplace emphasized the need for both behavioral and technology solutions that would help us to build the culture of a team that barely knew each other.
Once our priorities were clear, we designed the actions to develop our team and to help our top talent reach their maximum potential.
We worked together and involved different teams and areas. The commitment and engagement was incredible.
When everyone understands that they’re part of a group of people creating something bigger than themselves, great things happen.
Some key takeaways we focused on:
People as our main priority. We put our people at the center of our decisions. Our main priority is that our employees are fine. The leaders have been focusing a lot on being very close to their teams, on understanding the different needs and difficulties that they could be going through professionally or personally. Trust has been one of our core values during this journey.
Wellbeing and Flexibility. We relaunched a global campaign called FlexAbility 2.0, encouraging people to organize their working schedules according to their needs. We embraced practices like "zero-meetings Fridays." We also tried to minimize the number and duration of meetings. Instead of having 1-hour long meetings, we reduced the time to 45 minutes or 25 minutes.
Psychological Safety. We encouraged all the leaders to create a safe space for people to talk to each other about these complicated, emotional topics; to find the courage to ask for help, to be real, to understand what they were going through.
Listening to our employees. We had a strong communication rhythm across Latin America. In our Quarterly Townhalls anyone can ask any question, and someone in the company just answers them in real-time. We had coffee talks lead by the Area Business Leader, to understand the main difficulties they were having and what opportunities we had to make their work more effective; etc.
Team Executive Coaching. Monthly sessions for the new country or region leaders of the team.
Learning and Development training programs that we consider relevant within the current global context like: how to sell, negotiate and maintain relationships with clients remotely; Emotional Intelligence, Strengthen Remote Teams; etc.
In August we paused to evaluate how we were doing and to make the necessary adjustments. We are very proud of the results. The survey shows that we have increased our engagement from 71% to 94%.
We’ve also identified our main opportunities, and we've already started to work on them. We listened to our people and let them know that we are taking action.
I cannot be more grateful and excited about what we have gone through in these months. We know that we have outstanding leaders, each with unique talents, skills, and experience. The issues we face today are so big and challenging, it becomes quite clear we can't do this alone. We must do it as a team.
We know we have great foundations. This is an ongoing effort and we have to work on it every day. We are just getting started. There is more to do but I am really looking forward to it.