Engaging All Employees in the New Strategy

Mission

As a market leader, staying ahead of the competition requires a potent blend of continuous innovation, strategic thinking, and agility. That’s how Vinci Construction unveiled its new strategy, a product of collaborative effort with its teams. The challenge that followed was to quickly and effectively translate this strategy into action in order to accelerate its impact on the business.

The CEO of the French division turned to Adviso with a pressing question: “how can we expedite the cascading of this strategy all the way to our construction sites?” The objective was clear: make the strategy explicit and actionable; and empower the BU directors in its implementation.

Solution

At Adviso, we understand the critical importance of the “what’s in it for me” factor when it comes to translating strategy into action. Our experience has shown us that clarity is key. We understand how to make strategic goals clear and actionable throughout an organization, ensuring that everyone understands the benefits of implementing them.

In the context of Vinci, the challenge appeared to be two-fold:

• • Making the strategy more concrete to help teams translate it into actionable plans
  • Engaging the hierarchical chain in the communication in the unfavorable context of a profound reorganization

We brought together a team that blends strategic acumen, management prowess, and compelling storytelling skills.

In order to address these multifaceted challenges, we crafted an all-encompassing blueprint for success.

In order to help business units assess their performance across different dimensions of the strategy and identify concrete areas for development, we collaborated with internal experts to develop an operational excellence maturity model. Equipped with this tool, each BU head was able to conduct workshops with their direct reports and beyond, evaluating their current state and setting ambitions by selecting desired states to be achieved within the next three years. This exercise was instrumental in preparing more informed and strategy-aligned business plans at BUs.

Concurrently, we facilitated a series of workshops designed to assist top management and BU directors in integrating the strategy, as well as preparing deployment and communication plans. This process capitalized on the existing content and materials.

To further support this, we produced a podcast series to explain the strategy and its application points. Based on interviews with the top management, each episode addressed a specific dimension of the strategy in a clear, straightforward, and human way, revealing the profound aspirations of the company’s leaders. We deliberately chose what appeared to be a new medium for the company to align its form and content with one of the company’s key priorities: to act with even greater sobriety.

One of the most valuable outcomes of this approach was the significant reduction in the time gap between enacting the strategy and seeing tangible results on the field. The organization gained a new way of adapting quickly to changing market conditions, providing a repeatable framework for success.