Transforming Change: Transitioning to a category-led model across Europe for a global FMCG business
Responding to global trends in the FMCG space, our client decided to move to a fully category-led model across Europe. This change would mean integrating all previously multi-category markets into the category businesses while at the same time reorganising market groupings and increasing standardisation and centralisation across Europe to follow a “Europe-led” approach.
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“Our client successfully transitioned to their new organisational design and operating model across ~40 European markets, three categories, and thousands of employees.”
The Challenge
This project was a substantial organisational re-design change for employees that would impact almost every element of their work. Of course, the change was most significant for those employees being integrated from multi-category markets. However, it was essential to our client that the shift was viewed as an integration exercise and a new way of thinking for the entire European business and approached as one European team. This ‘one European team’ view was also a conscious move. In line with increased standardisation across Europe, our client wanted to move towards a more Europe-centric way of working and away from markets working and acting independently. This laddered up from market, to market group and market group to Europe, which represented a significant change in processes and ways of working and depended heavily on sizable mindset shifts across the organisation.
This change also brought many ‘tactical’ changes (systems, processes, reporting lines, ways of working, etc.). Still, these ‘softer’ changes were critical to success and particularly challenging to achieve.
Our client was also focused on the long term – how could they deliver this change in a way that would bring immediate success and build change capability to fortify future change success?
The Solution
Our team supported a newly formed team of change managers to design and execute a change management strategy for the described changes across Europe.
Firstly, this meant onboarding and upskilling the new team and implementing effective ways of working and governance. We worked with the team to build a baseline understanding of change management, keeping our client's short- and long-term change goals in mind.
We then worked closely with the newly activated team to design a European change management approach for the project, using it as an opportunity to nurture the team's development. Taking the European approach, our team worked with the change managers to tailor the plan to the individual needs of the markets, to activate key stakeholders, and then to deploy the approach.
Ensuring the progression of organisational change capability, we also worked with the team to cultivate change capability (knowledge, upskilling, and change leadership) within the markets, targeting key change stakeholders such as Leaders, Line Managers, and Change Champions, carefully establishing the platform for future transformations.
We acted as the European "Change Management Office", ensuring that the market-level change deployment connected to the European-scale project – providing portfolio-level updates to key European stakeholders and business leaders.
The Impact
Our client successfully transitioned to their new organisational design and operating model across ~40 European markets, three categories, and thousands of employees.
Using a specialist survey and tool to assess engagement levels, employees showed engagement scores of 4 out of 5 or higher across all areas and a high confidence level entering the transition. Qualitative feedback also showed high confidence levels and a positive attitude, with the "feeling on the ground" coming through change networks and managers being unusually favourable amid organisational change.
Not only was our client's substantial organisational re-design implemented successfully, but this project also marked the start of our client's in-house change capability arm. Supported by our team, our client now has a team of six capable, competent, and skilled change managers who can drive successful and sustained change adoption from go-live and are equipped to continue nurturing the broader organisational capability needed to navigate the thick and fast future of change.
