LEONI brings a cultural vision to life

Maximizing the impact of digital transformation

As digital transformation strategies have swept across the business world, many companies have approached these projects with the entirety of their focus on the process and technological elements. However, to truly utilize the power of digital, those organizations need to emphasize the importance of the culture associated with their ways of working. LEONI, a cable and harnessing manufacturer with branches across the globe, understood this and, when the organization identified a new future vision, became determined to launch a complementary cultural transformation.

As LEONI had grown and expanded over the years, its culture had splintered and become a multitude of regional and team-based silos. When this structure no longer suited the company’s future goals, it decided to work with its employees to identify key opportunities for improvement while it sought to create a single, global corporate cultural approach to fit its transformation plans. However, the scope of such a widespread cultural transformation presented a daunting challenge, and so the company partnered with Capgemini Invent to develop a roadmap to guide this process.

LEONI‘s road to a new cultural understanding

Together, LEONI and Capgemini Invent began by drawing upon a global employee survey that had shown many improvement opportunities, such as better communication around the company’s targets and strategy–neither of which had previously been provided to all employees–showing more appreciation to the employees, and designing more efficient processes. Based on this, the partners decided to establish a common understanding of LEONI’s culture that addressed the needs of its employees as well as leaders and that supports future business processes.

LEONI and Capgemini agreed upon a plan for engaging with employees and developing a cultural transformation roadmap that focused on the five core principles of Capgemini Invent’s New Change Deal:

• Shared Vision: Create, visualize, and spread a meaningful vision that guides people at all levels through the transformation journey
• Empowerment: Build on the potential of managers and employees by providing resources, enablement, and leeway
• Swarming: Use the energy and wisdom of the crowd
• Prototyping: Rapidly create tangible solutions and continuously improve their value through iterating on them
• Co-Design: Collaboratively involve all stakeholders to ensure a close link to the business.

Creating an engaging culture journey

As they followed this outline, LEONI and Capgemini began by considering the new corporate strategy and vision, the goal of which was to create a unified vision of LEONI’s future. Following an international approach, LEONI employees from all hierarchies and functions further contributed to a unified view of the business’ strategic goals. The partners set up an online platform through which all employees could participate and contribute to the program. Furthermore, LEONI employees around the world could volunteer and apply to be part of Design Thinking Labs, where their ideas for a new cultural understanding were brought to life.

With this approach, LEONI and Capgemini used the energy and wisdom of staff members from around the world to identify hot topics. Employees were then invited to propose and vote on cultural topics they wanted to address in the Design Thinking Labs. Within these workshops, participants used an agile, design-focused approach to rapidly create tangible solutions for the selected hot topics. In addition, members of the Design Thinking Labs were encouraged to use their personal networks during the lab phase to gather feedback and both verify and test their ideas in an iterative manner.

Following the Labs, the developed prototypes were presented to the rest of the LEONI organization using a Kickstarter approach, wherein all employees could contribute to scaling the prototypes. Selected projects that received the necessary funding through the Kickstarter campaign were then scaled throughout the whole organization.

LEONI, with the support of Capgemini Invent, used an agile, co-designing approach to bring a new cultural understanding to life. This was achieved by activating the whole organization and providing all employees with the chance to participate. In this way, LEONI has shown that cultural transformation can lead to tangible results by empowering the organization with the right tools and methods.