Driving cultural change at BASF
In this Asia Pacific case study from BASF, Christian Schubert provides practical experience on how social media can introduce new ways of working across organizational boundaries. He details how the company has seen significant positive effects on corporate culture and a more engaged workforce through its implementation of collaboration tool “Simplify”.
Facebook is a nation, Twitter is a revolution, YouTube is the school of the future. Of course, there’s no need to list these superlatives that underline the triumphal march that online social media has taken. At any multinational company, public affairs teams are cracking their heads on how to best cope with the risks and how to best use the opportunities resulting from the new online networks.
At this point, the focus of all this brainstorming is primarily directed at external communication. Comparatively less attention is dedicated to the question around what the benefits of online social media could be for enhancing employee communication and engagement. Also, there’s not a lot of research yet as to whether employees expect the same online networking opportunities within the company as they’re used to in their private lives. And if they do, whether they would be willing to share as much about themselves towards their colleagues as they do in their private networks. The most important question of all being, of course: Will online social media change the way companies operate?
The challenge
In 2009, BASF laid out its Strategy 2020 for Asia Pacific. The main aim is to grow on average two percentage points faster than the Asia Pacific chemical market each year, resulting in a doubling of regional sales by 2020. In this period, the company aims to create more than 5,000 new positions in the region1.
Globally, the BASF organization is set up as a matrix, with global divisions being responsible for their respective business across the world, and regional organizations to provide the respective functional platforms. With the rapid growth in Asia Pacific, the complexity of doing business has naturally been increasing during the past years. Reducing this complexity therefore was a key element for BASF in implementing its Asia Pacific strategy.
The cultural change
During the past years, BASF management and staff across the world have been engaged in changing the leadership and team culture of the company. A number of internal analyses and surveys had shown that there was a strong need for a more participatory culture based on collaboration, trust and people-orientation.
One major feedback from employees, especially in Asia Pacific, has been the demand for more responsibility and participation in decision making. In particular, the high complexity of the organization has been seen as one obstacle to freeing up resources needed to drive the fast growth in the region. Another aspect mentioned was the need for more transparency, exchange and collaboration between units. The famous quote that is probably valid for every multinational company can of course be adapted here: “If BASF only knew what BASF knows.”
As both the management and the teams in the region were eager to find a way to unlock the hidden potential of the organization, it was decided to try and tackle the need for more simplicity in Asia Pacific by building on a corporate culture of collaboration and trust.
One major feedback from employees, especially in Asia Pacific, has been the demand for more responsibility and participation in decision making
The platform
Instead of following the usual project approach with a dedicated team tasked with identifying opportunities for simplifying processes, BASF in Asia Pacific decided to implement a collaborative platform, entitled “Simplify”, that allows employees to collaborate online across more than 15 countries in the region.
The goal was to create a platform which was as easy to use as possible, to encourage the most wide-spread access. The platform was developed as a customized solution for BASF by communication agency Neuland + Herzer.
The collaboration between employees happens on the basis of “topics”. A topic is any issue that an employee wants to raise and can relate to any area of the company. The person initiating this discussion is called the “topic owner”: he or she sets a framework by posting a topic description and first thoughts on the platform.
From here, his or her colleagues are encouraged to add their views on this issue, ideally by providing tangible facts, measurable figures, best practice examples and learnings of previous undertakings. The platform has an integrated document upload function enabling contributors to share existing files of any kind – from presentations to department reports or a recent photo to illustrate an idea. A wiki-like topic proposal section allows all contributors to actively shape a concise topic proposal. It summarizes the facts and figures from the discussion, and gives a general idea and overall scope of the solution proposed.
In a very simple way, the platform creates a high degree of transparency across the region by showing all the topics that are being worked on, in a sort of “topic cloud”. In case an employee starts a new “topic” that’s already being worked on, the platform will suggest that he or she participate in the ongoing discussion.
As the discussion progresses so does the “maturity level”. This and the “activity level” are indicators about the vividness of the ongoing discussion around an issue as well as how close it is moving to implementation.
To this end, the abovementioned topic cloud gives a good overview, through the size and colour of the topic, where the energy of the organization is being invested in addressing burning issues.
The basis for implementation is a mini business plan, mandatory for every topic before it progresses from a discussion phase to an implementation phase. In it, the topic owner defines and quantifies the expected benefits of a successful simplification based on findings and conclusions from the online communities discussion. Rough guesstimates provide a ballpark figure on direct cost reductions and additional benefits such as opening up a new field of business, expected time savings or improved morale and well-being.
The actual implementation will then be done with and through the responsible functional or business unit, called “process owners” in the platform.
The results
To evaluate the actual participation in the platform, BASF is taking the general rule of thumb for participation in online forums, i.e. one person writes, 10 comment and 100 read. Applying this to a base of 10,000 BASF employees out of the total of 15,000, taking into consideration that a significant part of the staff are production workers who have access to the online media, but don’t have their own work PC. From this, we arrived at a target of 1,000 “contributors” and 100 “topic owners”. As this case study is going to press, more than 680 contributors are working on more than 85 topics – a very good result after only 10 months since the launch in April 2010.
In the meantime, five topics have actually been implemented, among them a change in the process of travel cost and a new process on how to manage supplier and customer visit reports. Another eight topics currently in implementation are following closely.
One crucial element of the platform is the mini business plan, focusing employees on delivering tangible results, be it cost reduction or top line potential. BASF dosen’t publish this number, but it’s rather encouraging to see what substantial potential there is to be implemented.
One crucial element of the platform is the mini business plan, focusing employees on delivering tangible results.
The learnings
One of the most interesting aspects of the platform from a strategic communication point of view is the learning that can be drawn from the experience in respect to further social media ventures. While certainly some of the learnings could also be applied to external activities, they predominantly allow for a better understanding of the effect that new media has on the change of the corporate culture.
Learning 1: Employees love to be connected… but in a different way than in their private sphere.
The speed with which the employees took to the Simplify platform shows the need they have to be better connected with their colleagues. Especially in highly complex organizations with a high degree of interactivity and interdependence across different countries, this need seems to be particularly urgent. The first results show that the principle of crowdsourcing, most prominently known from Wikipedia, but also from uncountable expert online forums, can be transferred to within a company.
What still needs more time to be evaluated is the sustainability of the success. The success of crowdsourcing is built on the willingness of the crowd to share their knowledge widely and freely. The reward for this seemingly altruistic behavior seems to be peer appreciation. In the first wave, BASF was able to perceive a similar attitude within the company. The early adopters were eager to share their knowledge and insights across unit borders.
The challenge now is to build the equivalent peer appreciation that also works within a workplace environment. Respect from colleagues and possible recognition by senior management seems to be one element. At the same time, BASF also perceived the need to reflect the level of participation in the overall performance appraisal process – to ensure that the core job tasks and the voluntary online contributions are rewarded in an integrated way.
Learning 2: Surprising results can be achieved.. but they don’t happen on their own.
When the platform was started, no one expected the results to be so substantial, and in such a short period of time. There was some concern that the online platform could be transformed into merely a “complaint box”. While certain platform elements, such as the mini business plan, were designed to avoid this, the first months showed an enormously high degree of seriousness and commitment from the employees. There was a strong drive to propose constructive ideas and suggestions and to really change the perceived shortcoming.
As the first topics were moving towards implementation, it became obvious that support was needed to take the topic from the platform into the “real world”. BASF had to find a way to make the connection between employees volunteering their knowledge within the online communities and the connection to the responsible functional leaders who would have to implement the changes in the offline organization. This transfer didn’t work automatically, the reasons ranging from a “not-invented-here” feeling in the function to a lack of resources to address these ideas. It also required a new culture of participation where the experts would accept ideas from “non-experts”.
To facilitate this process, BASF conducted face-to-face meetings for the topics close to implementation which included the most active contributors as well as the functional experts. At the same time, the functional experts are encouraged to enter into active dialogue with topic owners and to offer the expert support early on in the process to facilitate a smooth transfer from the idea to the implementation.
BASF conducted face-to-face meetings for the topics close to implementation which included the most active contributors as well as the functional experts
Learning 3: Management gets completely new insight… but they have to learn a new leadership approach.
For the regional management at BASF, the launch of the Simplify platform marked another change in the leadership culture. On the one hand, the platform widened the managers’ view on the issues in the region. Simplify provides new insights into existing pain points. This new transparency helps to address issues early on.
At the beginning though, there were some concerns voiced. “It took a certain amount of courage from our side. After all, this tool is something entirely new and the outcome was uncertain. We didn’t know how it would fit into our existing communication or working practices. And most importantly, how much would our employees challenge the status quo?” says Saori Dubourg, president, regional functions and country management Asia Pacific, and the initiator of Simplify. “But despite all these factors we were sure that collaborating in this modern way would enable entrepreneurship and would be the most promising way to deal with today’s business complexity.”
The result so far is rather encouraging. The opportunities for contributions from anyone, beyond company structures and hierarchies, prove to be an important driver for the aspired leadership culture. For employees in BASF, Simplify offers the opportunity to show their capabilities to a wider internal audience. For managers, even though they’re being challenged in a new way, it allows for solutions that can find a wider acceptance across the organization. That’s really what a collaborative platform is all about and what makes Simplify truly an internal social medium that can help drive employee engagement
Have your say
Was changing the leadership and team culture an objective in your organization? How did you drive this change? What channels, if any, did you use? Share your thoughts with us.
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