Big brands talk collaboration

On September 26th 2020, OrangeTrail hosted an online event where we invited four large brands to discuss COVID-19 and its implication for collaboration. We were joined by Irene Frijlink, Product Manager Adoption and Change at Nestlé, Dennis Agusi, Director of Communication Channels at Royal Philips, Benjamin Neuteboom, Technology Specialist at HEINEKEN, and Ramon Spildooren, Product Manager Digital meetings & Collaboration at FrieslandCampina.

Part I

The beginnings…

In Europe (where these organisations are headquartered) the first hit came in March. In this early phase most organizations focused on business continuity; making sure everyone was enabled to work from home. All 4 organisations had already moved significant portions of their infrastructure to the Cloud, which offered them a major advantage in dealing with the crisis. Some even used the pandemic to speed up that transition. All of the organisations viewed this period as quite successful because most employees could (at least from a technical perspective) work from home quite easily.

Phase 2

In the next phase, the focus started to shift from simply enabling access to the technology, to empowering people use the tools well through the help of more specialized training. Nestlé, HEINEKEN, and FrieslandCampina were also clear in stating they put a lot of focus on the non-technical aspects of remote work. As put by Irene: “We quickly realised this is more than technology.” At FrieslandCampina they started a cross-functional program with HR, IT, Comms, and Facilities that look at all aspects of the new work realities, from promoting well-being to redefining rituals. At HEINEKEN they focused on sharing inspiring ‘use cases’ that combine ways of working supported by technology. In the words of Benjamin: “Don’t sell the tool, but sell the way of working.”

Experience of 4 Organisations

Nestlé

At Nestlé, Irene and her team reacted quickly to make support & learning available to help employees adapt to the new situation. Recognizing that working remotely is about much more than technology, they focused on different elements of remote work including: how to create a good work environment at home; communicating & collaborating with colleagues; hosting engaging meetings; and, the more tech aspect, supporting users in getting familiar with the tools themselves. Knowing the impact of user experience and effective help channels was significant in this effort.

On a personal level, Irene described a big change: “All of a sudden you are in peoples’ personal space. You see their living room, their pets, their children, and in the middle of a call people sometimes need to answer the door because the groceries are delivered.”. She noted how this created a sense of more acceptance, of “we’re all in this together”.

Royal Philips

At Philips, the transition went smoothly. IT developed trainings early on, and online townhalls became the norm. Philips saw a major uptake in the use of Yammer that allowed people across different teams and departments to stay connected, with even some ad-hoc social initiatives being developed here and there. A virtual fitness class every Friday, a virtual Yoga class, virtual happy hours and a Philips acronym quiz were some of the initiatives blooming in the first few months of remote work. The drive that naturally occurred was quite impactful. As noted by Dennis: “No adoption program would replicate this situation and be such an effective push to digitize organizations.” All participants agreed.

HEINEKEN

HEINEKEN saw similar patterns to Nestlé and Philips. From the start, the CEO used Workplace by Facebook to engage employees. The technical transition was also smooth.

Something that worked well at HEINEKEN was using their collaboration & communication tools to run a scalable support program for users and local IT. MS Teams was used for real-time, transparent updates to Local IT, allowing all countries to see what the others were doing, learning from one another and helping each other. For end users, engaging campaigns and easy access to support was available in communities hosted straight on the platform. Finally, HEINEKEN didn’t only talk tech. They focused on the user perspective and the actual benefits to one’s daily work: what can this technology help me accomplish? They’ve called this the use case perspective.

FrieslandCampina

“You help locally but scale globally.”, pointed out Ramon, mentioning the similarities he saw internally at FrieslandCampina with the HEINEKEN approach. Ramon talked extensively about the importance of analyzing data during these times. Doing this early on allowed him to learn that people were using only some of the functionality available, or that they were focusing on re-creating previous ways of working onto the new platforms. Employees went from sitting in meetings in the office all day to sitting in MS Teams meetings all day. True collaboration was still not part of the picture. He asked himself: What do successful users do? And based his support around those topics.

Our event continued with one of our own signature JAM sessions. Stay tuned for the next post, where I’ll be talking about the input we got straight from our event attendees on what THEY see the challenges of the coming months are.

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Part II.

In this part, we are going to talk about the JAM session we ran midway through OrangeEpisode#9. JAMs are written only, live online brainstorm sessions, and a signature tool of OrangeTrail, but a first to be used with our OE audience.

We asked participants about the challenges they see in their role or in their organisation in general in the coming months. Their responses highlight some important points with consequences for organisations, leaders and employees. Here’s a summary of their responses and some highlights:

Outcomes of our JAM session

Concerns around Connection & Collaboration

• How to define the ‘new normal’ when the situation is constantly changing? How to manage the uncertainty?
• Teams calls on video are great but not the same as a chance hello, with additional challenges for making new starters feel welcomed and comfortable ‘We need to design for high touch moments.’
• How do we maintain a team spirit if we have to go back to working from home 100%? ‘We need to strike the right balance between offering flexibility and maintaining team cohesion.’
• ‘Teams chat and video calls are widely used but the actual Teams “communities” and new ways of working related to that are still very new to people. This is going to be one of our main projects with IT and HR for next year.’
• While communication within a team seems to run quite smoothly, communication across team borders/silos is not always obvious.

Concerns around Support & Resources

• The pace of change of platforms and channels is a challenge for employees.
• Leadership is not always happy or able to accommodate new levels of “freedom” and flexibility. They need to be helped and trained to manage in this new format.
• Is IT properly resourced to support in working at this level? They need to develop ‘human and process skills’ or work closer with other functions (across silos).
• Employees need to be informed, without being overwhelmed.
• Providing clarity in the landscape of tooling is a must, as many tools are (and are becoming) available.

A look at future plans

After the JAM, we moved the conversation to the future and explored some plans for action. What are these big brands working on and thinking about to handle the future?

Ramon from FrieslandCampina told us that they’ve set up a cross-functional team (HR, IT, Facilities, and Communications) that is looking together at the bigger picture. They’re redefining rituals as well as talking employee well-being. Reinforcing again the importance of looking at the numbers, Ramon points out that ‘We’re not as good in remote work as we think. If you look at the data, there is a lot more we can do.’ FrieslandCampina is therefore now exploring the idea of a digital academy to make sure everyone gets these skills.

Irene from Nestlé observed how the already strong ties between people are doing well, but teams need to focus on also making sure weaker ties don’t get weaker. She will also look at further enabling the people that support users locally.

Benjamin from HEINEKEN is confident in the value of continuing their ‘use case’ focused way of communicating, where they emphasize the day-to-day benefit of using the tooling and provide inspiration through in-company examples. There will also be focus on security. And not unimportantly, Corona also puts the focus on keeping costs low.

Dennis from Royal Philips shared many of the stories above. He added that at Philips, they’ve had team playbooks for some time and that in the coming weeks, they’re going to adjust these to also cover digital and remote scenarios.

Closing

We closed the panel discussion with a final question: In one sentence, what’s your biggest goal, challenge or reflection for the coming months?

Dennis: How to keep the company culture without being together?

Irene: Focus on digital dexterity (get everyone to the next level and feel comfortable)

Ramon: Trust in the cross-functional team and get behind them. Allow us to experiment.

Benjamin: [The new situation] gives us the opportunity to work from anywhere. Why couldn’t we work from just any HEINEKEN office in the world?

This OrangeEpisode showed that for a large part the big brands are dealing with similar issues during the pandemic. However, the nuances each organization applied to the situation provide interesting points of reflection, as does the input received from attendees during the JAM. One thing clearly stood out. IT is mainly a facilitator. Success still lies with the people adopting new rituals and learning new skills.

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