Context and Challenge
A medium sized chemical manufacturing company based out of Mumbai, was looking at driving performance through an alignment of the employees and departments to the organization strategy.
The company had a long history of being a benevolent employer and had never removed any employee. It was run like a family and all employees were treated as family members. A lot of informality prevailed. There were no job descriptions and work got done based on verbal instructions. The organization grew gradually as the time was benign and external environment and competition was not harsh. The son of the promoter had joined the company about 1 year back after his education abroad. He had worked at lower position in the company before going abroad for higher education.
After one year of rejoining, the promoter’s son felt that the organization was complacent and this could prove to be dangerous if the external environment turned against them. He was sensing changes in the external world and competition was becoming stiff. He wanted to build a more resilient organization and the first step towards this was to initiate a performance driven culture (a results-oriented culture) in alignment with the organization strategy. One of the things he felt was that he was doing a lot o things in various departments which he should not be doing and due to this he was under tremendous time pressure. He wanted people to be accountable and result oriented and take initiative to achieve results.
Solution
The first thing we noticed was that the company did not have a robust enterprise as well as employee performance management systems. Strategy of the organization was known to a handful of people. There was no formal mechanism for aligning people actions to the company objectives.
We proposed a series Strategy Clarification and Strategy Translation workshops for the employees. The workshop content was adjusted to suit the hierarchical levels as well as the time availability. More than 20 workshops were conducted in the head office and the plant and each workshop was attended by 20 to 30 people.
The BSC Strategy Execution framework was used extensively starting from defining the Financial Goals of the enterprise to the job description and KPI of the individuals. In between, functional goals and their alignment and cascade were conducted over a period of 2 months.
The company now has a Strategy Scorecard, functional objectives and initiatives, Measures and finally each employee is linked to the Organization Strategy Scorecard through the individual and functional scorecards.