Why and why now

The world we live in is becoming more volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous with each passing day. Organisations must become more agile in responding to fast-paced changes to stay competitive and profitable.

Ipragaz decided such an evolution could transform their business into a lean, agile and change-ready organisation to stay competitive and profitable. They set a solid future vision of what they wanted to look like as a company.

What’s in a name?

Knowing that the transformation would take time and gradual improvements would be made, the change was called an ‘evolution’.  The evolution would start with the business processes.

The Six Batteries of Change insights helped Ipragaz understand that energy flows between the management infrastructure battery and culture battery, which is an essential balance of energy. The Six Batteries of Change scan also highlighted that lack of strategy and change communication, cross-functional collaboration, and a healthy change culture was draining Ipragaz’s organisational energy.

Armed with these insights, Ipragaz knew that the change in business processes needed to be supported by a change in employees’ behaviours, attitudes and habits, i.e. culture, to become a successful Ipragaz in the future.  Now, this evolution just needed a name….

EPIC means grand in scale or characteristics, and younger colleagues use the word to describe something they like! EPIC’s dual meaning perfectly reflected the scale, motivation and energy needed to be successful.

The mission of this EPIC journey was to do the following:

• Communicate a clear purpose
• Focus on the people and process with energised, decisive and resilient team members who would not stop until they made change happen
• Constant feedback loops that improved approaches and practices for the learning, development and change experiences that created a high-performance culture

Rules of the game

To bring the employees on the EPIC journey and realise true diversity and inclusion, colleagues from different departments, age groups, genders, and backgrounds across the business had to answer one question: “what kind of organisation do you want to be part of?” The door was open to anyone who wanted to contribute to creating a better version of Ipragaz.  Insights from colleagues across the business, along with the actions coming out of the Six Batteries of Change scan, were put into projects and change initiatives under the EPIC banner.  EPIC, Diversity & Inclusion and the Six Batteries of Change all fed into each other’s KPIs and became one EPIC programme.

EPIC projects and initiatives followed the Leader Led Change principles, based on the ‘Energise for success’ change management approach, which allows projects and programs to be successfully delivered, whereby the senior leadership team were dubbed the “Six Leaders of Change”.  EPIC’s rules of engagement were defined as follows:

• MBU is the primary sponsor
• Every department takes part in this program with their change initiative, including both a business and people focus
• Not HR but logistics managers were appointed the change leaders
• Understanding that if there was to be a new (digital) transformative way of working, there had to be a cultural transformation that would support and energise it simultaneously; therefore, the main focus of this program was on the culture change

How did they do it?

Five projects were set up to be delivered by cross-functional teams. Based on the feedback and analysis mentioned before, the projects were :

• Flexible Working Model. This focused on (regardless of covid) the new working approaches; flexible working hours and lunchtime, hybrid working conditions, options to work in other cities for one month over the summer etc.
• Feedback and Learning. This project aimed to work on accelerating 2-way dialogue and learning culture with many practices, e.g. role plays, training, how-to videos, open-door meetings with directors, digital feedback platforms, running communication campaigns through the internal Instagram account (MaAile) etc. (Read their impact story here)
• New Office Design: In collaboration with the flexible working model, energy flow, comfort and joy, the new office design included recent trends and provided solutions such as a digital archive, a reservation system, and creating social areas.
• Effective Management Meeting defined specific rules to enhance efficiency such as not organising meetings for more than 30 minutes, no meetings before 9:00 or after 16:00, during lunchtime or after Friday lunchtime, always having an authorised meeting leader, circulating and following up on meeting minutes and actions etc.
• Digital Workplace aimed to explore different technological applications via rethinking how we do business, e.g. smart, Virtual / Mix smart technologies, trainings etc.

Volunteer leaders, enablers and over 60 colleagues using the project level approach were executing the projects. The two ‘Six Batteries of Change’-certified change ambassadors, ten change agents, and dedicated teams worked tirelessly to make change happen.

Business impact

Many improvements were made across the organisation by well-equipped change-focused people focused on efficient and effective business processes.  As a result, EPIC impacted life-work balance, employee engagement, operational excellence, cost management, sustainability, health & safety and more.

A bright future lies ahead, where we have energised batteries and employees on an EPIC journey!