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Change Comms as part of a large-scale DAX-40 project

Success Story OEM

How 40,000 employees of a car manufacturer (OEM) overcame their fears of a massive change and began to embrace it.

CLIENT & INDUSTRY

Car Manufacturer (DAX-40),
Automotive Industry

 

SERVICES

Transformation Communications

Mindset Change

Culture Change

Transformation

  • 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.

Social & Emotional Aspects

  • 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.

viadoo's Contribution to Success

  • 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 managers,
    • 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?”.
  • We also generated a hybrid process (online and face-to-face elements) to develop a shared change vision.
  • As a central element of the change architecture, we set up the transformation communications strategy and plan that could then be implemented by the OEMs Internal Comms.
  • 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.).
  • 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 competitiveness.

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Category: Process Optimization