LIW partnered with a leading logistics company based in Europe to help drive a cultural change to put both the employee and the customer at the heart of their business. The global organisation specialises in sea freight, airfreight, contract logistics and overland businesses. With over 70,000 employees in 1,300 locations over 100 countries, it’s one of our most exciting projects to date!
The challenge
In the past, the keys to success in the logistics industry were process, precision, and timely execution. But recently the industry has experienced rapid change and increased complexity including environmental demands, digitalisation, and labour market changes. The Covid pandemic piled on the pressure even further and many logistics organisations have struggled to adapt.
This led the client to embark on an ambitious organisational transformation, a journey towards being the best company to work for,and the best company to do business with. This meant cultural change was needed, putting the employee and the customer at the heart of all their activities. To help drive change at senior management level, the TRANSFORM programme was created.
The solution
In partnership with the client, we designed a leadership experience which offered innovative ways to learn and experiment, including social learning, remote/virtual participation and collaboration, and incorporating an understanding of the psychological drivers and barriers to learning and change.
All LIW programmes are underpinned by building a deep understanding of our clients’ business context which we capture in the Design for ImpactTM (D4i) document at the beginning of our engagement. This enables us to link the business objectives to the learning and behaviour outcomes we are aiming to achieve.
In designing the solution to deliver the desired outcomes we focused on three key principles;
- ‘Doing to learn’ approach: Putting learning into the workplace rather than the application being an afterthought.
- Bite-size learning combined with an experimental approach to apply real learning in the real world.
- Peer support: In addition to external coaching, the peer support network built deep leadership capabilities inside the organisation.
The programme was built on a structure of blended learning; a “Hot House” event that included a simulation and input on key learning topics. This was followed by a series of workshops, pod-based learning sprints supported with coaching, as well as individual coaching to support learning and experimentation in-role to help accelerate the impact on participants’ real work.
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, face-to-face elements of the TRANSFORM programme needed to transition to virtual. To ensure the learning experience remained highly engaging and not seen as just another Zoom meeting, LIW innovated, creating a radio show format “TRANSFORMfm”. This provided a live learning experience that brought together subject matter experts, interviews, guest speaker slots, Q&A sessions and music. The format was highly successful and appreciated by participants.
Find out how our innovative FM solution works in this video
The results
The programme has delivered dramatic impact as well as more subtle changes to the participants and their teams. An overwhelming message to participants about leadership is the recognition of the importance of team perspectives, building autonomy and accountability.
Participants identify tangible business outcomes as result of the programme that include:
- Increased employee and customer engagement
- Increased focus on customer service
- Improved productivity
- Development of a coaching culture
- Increased revenue and profitability
- Greater accountability and decision making pushed deeper into the organisation
”I realised that you don’t transform mindsets through tasks, but you transform them through people – this is the power you have as a leader.”
TRANSFORM participant, Senior Leadership Team.
In one case, a country head was able to increase both staff and customer retention, customer NPS, and significantly grow profits after implementing this new cultural leadership approach.
Participant recommendation ratings rose from 75% to over 80%, even after the programme switched to virtual, demonstrating the impact of the new FM format.
Read our EFMD Excellence in practice award submission document here.
