Seeding new ways of working across a global beauty organisation.
Help a traditional organisation cut through bureaucracy and navigate uncertainty to stay ahead of the market.
New ways of working seeded across every division in the business, supported by a strong community of advocates who are rapidly spreading across the business.
Context
Beauty brands are under immense pressure to adapt to an increasingly complex market: with shifts toward beauty freelance platforms, consumers moving online and direct to consumer subscription brands on the rise, the need to innovate and adapt has never been more pressing.
Whilst our client recognised these changing needs, their ability to bring things to market and for their teams to act on their ideas was held back by their existing ways of working.
Our approach
We immediately rolled up our sleeves and ‘started by starting’, jumping in with a handful of teams across the business. Together with these teams, we quickly got a taste of the approaches that would help.
We wrapped the change around the work rather than doing change for change’s sake. Focusing on priority projects meant teams could deliver meaningful missions, whilst adopting an entirely new way of working and organising.
The teams learned by doing, spending 12 weeks with us by their sides, they adopted simple practices that slowly shifted their mindsets and behaviours. No training programme can compare to rolling up your sleeves, making mistakes, and applying it to the work that really matters.
Experiencing this change was critical to create a growing community of advocates and change-makers. Our approach from day one was to plant the seeds for systemic change, but importantly, hand over the reins to people within the business who could really take it organisation-wide.
Head of Culture Transformation, Global Beauty BrandThese principles have made me question how and why I engage in my daily work. The team has more collaboration, clearer communication, streamlined meeting structures, and as a result are a happier and a more autonomous team.
What did we do?
- We experimented across every division in the business, working with pilot teams over 8-12 weeks to embed new principles and test out different working practices.
- We kicked each team off with a bang, creating clarity, momentum and excitement for the sprint ahead. We worked with the teams, their leaders and stakeholders to coach new ways of working, both in the moment and in dedicated working sessions.
- We quickly identified individuals in each team who would take our place, and supported them as they stepped up, providing focused training and coaching.
- Across 2 waves of pilots, we adapted the principles, ensuring that we were tackling the most pertinent issues and using language that resonated most with the organisation.
The outcome
By adopting new ways of working the teams were able to deliver some incredible things and here’s just a few of them:
- A cross-division product launch that has set the standard for future launches
- A customer-focused eCommerce supply chain, reducing wasteful communication and meetings by 50%, creating a more collaborative relationship, and creating one view of the data
- A new ideas testing service that fundamentally changes the approach to service and product development
As well as delivering impact for the business, the teams made significant strides in adopting a new way of working, with up to 50% improvement on key measures focused on transparency, learning, effective meetings and iterative mindsets.
What’s next?
This is just the start of an exciting transformation; with the seeds planted and significant impacts already felt, the appetite to continue to scale across the full organisation is huge.
With the community of advocates equipped to take it to their surrounding teams, we are now stepping back to address the knottier issues the business is facing, and to design a broader approach to scaling new ways of working in a sustainable and impactful way.