Turning resistance into transformation momentum

Transformation Communication + Change Management

How we engaged 40,000 employees and helped a global automotive OEM reduce a critical core process by 30%

Initial Situation

The executive board of an automotive OEM with more than 120,000 employees worldwide (turnover: +100 billion EUR) wanted to shorten a core process by about 30 percent as part of a group-wide transformation.

In the past, such efforts had regularly failed due to the resistance of the function units (mindset: „That’s not possible because …“).

However, since the importance of time to market was constantly increasing, the shortening had to succeed this time.

Around 40,000 employees were directly or indirectly affected by this.

Therefore, a transformation communications strategy was urgently needed.

Challenge

As already in the past, those affected again perceived the planned transformation with its effects on many sub-processes as a threat.

This led to strong fears and turmoil among the staff.

At the same time, the board demanded a new attitude from them (mindset: „This would work if …“) and a correspondingly different behaviour.

This potential restriction of freedom to act led to reactance and resistance against the change project.

Solution

In order to effectively counter the fears and resistance to the top-down change among the 40,000 people affected, we at viadoo relied on as much participation as possible as well as informative and emotional communication.

In this way, the employees were to be actively involved in the change, engage in constructive dialogue with their respective executives, gain trust and be motivated to adopt the new mindset.

First, we conducted a stakeholder and change impact analysis.

Then we developed a change narrative to provide leaders with answers to the questions “Why?” and “Why now?”.

This was followed by the design of classic corporate design elements such as key visuals, templates for brochures, slides, flyers, and posters, as well as concepts for informational events.

We also generated a hybrid process (online and face-to-face elements) for the executive board to develop a shared vision.

As a central element of the change architecture, we set up the transformation communications strategy and editorial plan that could then be implemented by the OEMs Internal Comms.

Results

Based on our editorial plan, the project team conducted dialogues with stakeholders through internal channels via interviews, events and multimedia storytelling (video clips, news article, posters etc.). This way, they helped them to overcome their fears and to embrace the change.

With our transformation communications, we ultimately contributed to the 30 percent reducution of the core process and correspondingly to the speed-up of time-to-market.

This increased the OEM’s global competitiveness.

As we naturally take the confidentiality of our clients seriously, we anonymize our success stories. However, the cases are real.