by Katrien Decroos | Mar 19, 2024 | All, Communication, HR & People Solutions, Risk & Crisis, Social Dialogue, Strategy, Transformation
Due to economic circumstance and strategic motives, the Belgian e-commerce firm Unigro had to cease its activities. CEO Yves Moens faced the challenging responsibility of informing stakeholders and employees about the reorganisation. For support in their crisis communication, they got in touch with Square Circle.
Why did Unigro decide to contact Square Circle?
“For various reasons, Unigro had to stop its activities, which resulted in a collective dismissal of all our employees”, says Yves Moens. “In the first phase, we had to communicate this to our works council, our employees, and all our other stakeholders: customers, labour administration, partners, suppliers, and the media. Considering our inexperience with this type of communication, its delicate nature and the importance of timing, we decided to contact an outside expert.”
How Square Circle offered crisis communication support
Roadmap
Crisis communication is about conveying a narrative, tailored to the concerns and needs of its target group. That is why Square Circle first organised a workshop to map out stakeholders, decide what to communicate to each, what channels would be used and who would be responsible for the communication.
Crisis communication
Next, we further developed the narrative so it could be presented to the Works council in Belgium. Once approved by the group management and labour lawyer, we started creating the necessary communication artefacts, information tools and documents the management team could use to anticipate questions from stakeholders.
“It was incredibly important to involve the local management team in the process”, says Katrien Decroos, crisis communication expert at Square Circle, “If they understand the narrative, they can pass it on more easily to employees and onboard others. That would inspire trust. And trust was needed, as employees would have to continue work at Unigro months after the layoff announcement.”
Media training
Once Unigro’s story was clearly defined, Square Circle provided the management team with media training, showing them how to adjust their message to stakeholders and communication channels, and coaching on how to manage the employees on a day-to-day basis in uncertain times. Finally, on the day of the announcement, Katrien Decroos was present at Unigro’s headquarters to receive and address the press. “We were grateful to have a partner in our building who could accommodate the press, guide them and answer their questions”, says Yves Moens. “That was very favourable to our company’s image.”
Did Unigro consider the communication to be successful?
“We were very pleased with the final result”, remarks Yves Moens. “Our message was nicely tailored to each stakeholder and, thanks to a highly detailed roadmap, everything was planned out down to the minute at the announcement. Also, with Square Circle’s guidance, we were able to retain our employees’ trust through effective communication and uphold the long-standing reputation of Otto Group, our parent company.”
Would Unigro recommend the partnership with Square Circle?
“Absolutely”, says Yves Moens. “Their approach was very pragmatic and we loved that. They had tools and templates at their disposal which they could customise to our project and company. It offered a foothold for this difficult process. Add to that their flexibility and responsiveness, their readiness to answer any immediate questions we had. That is very valuable during a communication crisis where timing is everything. Without Square Circle, we would not have been able to communicate so accurately and professionally.”
What advice would Unigo give other companies undergoing a restructuring process?
“Make sure you are well prepared”, suggests Yves Moens. “That means surrounding yourself with the right partners to determine a communication strategy and roadmap, so you can convey the layoff announcement adequately to the stakeholders involved. Of course, this kind of preparation takes time. In many cases, headquarters wants communication to follow quickly, but you can only communicate this delicate message once. Luckily, the Otto Group gave us enough time to prepare. So, don’t rush it. A nuanced message takes time to compose.”
Do you need support with crisis communication? Square Circle has more then 20 years expertise in preparing, developing and implementing crisis communication strategy for restructurings, reorganisations and closures. Square Circle trains spokespersons in handling the media and onboard internal communicators in communication in uncertain times. Get in touch with us for more information.
by Katrien Decroos | Feb 28, 2024 | All, Communication, Strategy
How would you describe the personality of your business in just a few words? And how would your colleagues describe it? A company with an identity connects your employees and aligns them with your overall mission and vision. Square Circle provides you with interesting insights to help define and implement your values.
Involve your team in the process
Values should be worn like a suit, not kept in a suitcase that you only open when you need it. You embrace values because they are personally meaningful and because they add something to the way you work as a team. They need to be shared by everyone in your company to be effective. That is why values cannot be determined top-down and employees should be involved in creating values that work.
Create clear and limited values
Values shape your company culture, how employees behave, how strategies are decided, and how successes are celebrated. Values should be lived by your employees and expressed in their day-to-day interactions. For this reason, it is important that your values clearly express what is expected of your employees. Do not hesitate to fundamentally review your values, and involve your employees in the process, in order to (re)formulate them and clarify these expectations. You will see how energising this is!
Limit the amount of your values to three or four. A higher number will be hard to translate into specific behaviour, increasing the chances that your employees won’t live by them. Do you have five or more values? Review them critically, perhaps you are overestimating the capabilities of your team.
Set an example and promote the right behaviour
Values should be promoted top down, by talking about them regularly at team meetings. By using them as a compass in evaluating employee behaviour. By emphasising proper behaviour as well as speaking up to those who don’t put your values into practice.
Management plays a key role in implementing a company’s values. As a leader, you must think about them daily and talk about them regularly. If values are upheld, employees are more motivated, more involved and more connected with management, benefitting, in turn, your customers, partners and stakeholders.
Need support in reviewing or defining your company values? Square Circle helps employees reflect on values through interactive workshops. Working bottom-up, we help define values and their corresponding behaviours, always taking care that they are equally supported by upper management. Together, we can come to clear agreements. Curious to know more? Get in touch.
by Katrien Decroos | Feb 22, 2024 | All, Communication, HR & People Solutions, Strategy, Transformation
In a world teeming with ideas and aspirations, the bedrock of any successful venture lies in a clear purpose, encapsulated in the trinity of vision, mission, and values. But what makes a strong vision and mission, and how do you define them? Square Circle offers strategic advice to help you get started on your winning strategy.
Leave ‘missions’ to the military and James Bond
A word of advice: replace the term ‘mission’ with ‘core purpose’. Ask your receptionist what her job’s core purpose is and she’ll be able to answer it. Inquire about her mission and she’ll most likely stare at you in bewilderment. The same holds for your employees. A core purpose gives meaning to their work. It is the reason why your activity was created and your organisation exists. Without roots, we don’t know where we’ve come from and even less, where we can go.
A core purpose does not have to be unique. Feeding people is the core purpose of many food companies. Yours can be to feed people healthily and sustainably. What makes you unique, however, is how you translate this core purpose into a powerful vision: what kind of company do you want to become? Without a core purpose, there can be no vision.
Prepare for the future with a strong vision
A strong vision can transform a boring strategy into a scoring strategy. It describes how your company responds to technical, technological or societal evolutions – think of challenges such as climate change or the rise of AI – and what opportunities they offer your company.
Identify pillars
The first step is to determine the pillars of your vision: what areas determine the evolution of your activities? For a building company, this might be developments in civil engineering, the ability to build more complex structures or to ensure safety.
Define goals
Next, strong and ambitious goals need to be defined for each of the pillars, the kind that gives you goosebumps, that excites and motivates you. These goals can be both qualitative and quantitative. To give you an example, the following is a goal formulated by an American manufacturer of concrete:
“In 10 years, we will be producing engineering and civil engineering structures that will be 2 times more resistant, 2 times more durable and half as expensive – both in terms of construction and maintenance – than those of today. We will also build them twice as fast.”
Rely on your team
Pillars can be defined by your management. For specific goals, we recommend drawing upon the knowledge and creativity of your team. Divide your employees into small working groups and have them discuss and analyse these pillars and define goals for a period of 3 years, 10 years, or more depending on your type of market. You’d be surprised what they can come up with.
Developing a vision is fascinating work. It forces you to imagine your company in the future, to respond to ongoing developments in the world and to come up with bold ideas. However, there’s one key ingredient missing to implement your vision: your corporate values.
by Katrien Decroos | Nov 27, 2023 | All, Communication, HR & People Solutions
Measuring employee engagement annually via a survey is a regular practice in many companies. A good thing, if you take this process seriously. This blog shares the do’s-and-don’ts when conducting a employee engagement survey in your company. Valuable reading for management, hr and anyone who leads people.
Engagement survey? A good idea!
Engaged and loyal employees are the best ambassadors for any organisation. Not surprisingly, the engagement survey is well established at numerous medium sized to large companies. There are quite a few providers on the market that make sending out an engagement questionnaire to all your employees quite easy and that provide you with insightful reports on the results.
But what is the best way to go about this? How do you get the most out of this survey?
Moving beyond HR
A staff survey creates expectations. You offer employees the opportunity to have their voices heard, express their satisfaction and commitment and share any concerns or suggestions. It is therefore logical that they expect something to be done with their input. Think about this in advance. A common pitfall is to appoint only human resources to work with the survey results. But fostering engagement is not just the work of HR. Achieving engagement is an everyday task and has more power through direct managers, with the help of HR.
Communication and customisation as accelerators
Timely and clear communication about the engagement survey with proper framing is necessary to generate impact. One e-mail, often sent centrally, calling for people to complete the survey will get less response than if the questionnaire is additionally framed and motivated by the direct manager, at a team meeting for example or through an additional messaging. It’s important to explain the context, why you are launching this survey and what you will do with the results.
“Can I share my opinion anonymously?” “What happens to my answers after the end of the previous survey?” “How will we be informed about the results?” These are just some of the questions you should answer in your accompanying communication when sending out the survey.
The results are available, now what?
The management team puts its heads together and chooses a number of targeted actions . Driven to move from result to action, they sometimes forget to give proper feedback to employees: What were the main results of the engagement survey? What did we as management learn from it? What are the results we already want to work on or the actions we have already identified?
If you want to get the most out of your employee engagement survey, go one step further and actively involve the employees themselves in working with the survey results: As a manager, enter into a dialogue about your own team’s results, ask for additional interpretation, let team members make their own suggestions or set up small working groups around certain themes.
Say what you do, and do what you say
As well as a few ‘quick fixes’ that can be implemented quickly and are easily visible to everyone, there are also issues that take more time and may be less visible. Employees are often left wondering where the survey has led, and if this is not clear to them, the desire to have their voice heard next time will diminish. Square Circle therefore stresses the importance of communication and follow-up communication. “Say what you do, and do what you say”. Link back to actions that have been taken or are in progress, and take the liberty to say where you do not plan to invest for example. Continue to involve employees wherever possible and systematically strengthen their commitment to your company.
Square Circle’s senior hr and communication experts are available to strengthen your hr, communication and leadership skills within this framework, making your next edition a success.
Contact Square Circle >>
Listening sessions that reduce distance and increase engagement
Square Circle deepens your employee engagement survey with listening sessions. Confidential group discussions with several employees holding different positions in preparation for or after the survey. They allow you to delve deeper into hot topics, discover drivers and throw up initial solutions. Our experience shows that listening sessions give more meaning to survey results. This leads to higher awareness among management, HR and leaders on the one hand, and to more commitment by staff on the other. A win-win!
by Katrien Decroos | Jun 8, 2023 | Communication, HR & People Solutions, Transformation
Anyone who has ever organised a party knows Sabam as the Belgian association of authors, composers and publishers that collects copyrights for the music you play. But Sabam is so much more than an administrative collector. On the eve of its 100th anniversary – in January 2022 – new CEO Steven De Keyser presented its future: to be a solid, transparent and reliable partner for authors and users. Helping turn that vision into reality is a daily task for Head of HR Sofie Vlaeminck and her team. They enlisted the help of Square Circle to help support this transition. We asked Sofie to share her experiences with us.
Square Circle: We help companies strengthen their teams and individuals, how have we at Sabam contributed to that?
Sofie: “Sabam is in a big transformation, we have a new CEO who has implemented a different organisational structure with some big shifts for the employees, with a number of employees also moving from an expert role to a leadership role. So we have relied primarily on your support to coach those people in their leadership growth. For them, you also organised a New Leader Assimilation workshop to strengthen the connection between the leader and the team. In addition, you also coached the sales team to introduce a more commercially focused way of working and mapped out a customer journey of our customers.”
Why did you look for our help?
“The transformation is of such magnitude that we quickly felt in our small HR department that we could use some support for this. For example, we also moved to a new, smaller building where only about 100 people can work at a time. So we introduced a new, hybrid way of working In addition, we also went through a year of social negotiations on salary costs. In short, we understood very quickly that we needed support to manage that change.
“The transformation is of such magnitude that we quickly felt in our small HR department that we could use some support for this.”
How have the trajectories gone? What is the feedback from the coachees?
“Very positive. You know, a number of our managers are people who, mainly from their expertise, got the chance to take on a managerial role at some point. But they are not used to people management, Partly thanks to your coaching, we now notice change. For example, a people manager who struggled to hold difficult conversations and until recently always called on our help for this, now does so on her own. There are also managers who are somewhat insecure by nature, but after the coaching they dare to bring up certain things, whereas before this always went through us. The common thread in all trajectories is that our leaders become more autonomous, that we are much less solicited to provide support in certain matters.”
“The common thread in all trajectories is that our leaders become more autonomous, that we are much less solicited to go and support in certain matters.”
What does Square Circle’s help mean for you as an HR team?
“Until recently, HR was the typical payroll HR service. But human resources and working with people did not receive enough attention. We are now trying to make that turnaround. That means mainly focusing on people development, and making sure you create a working environment that is pleasant and in which they have every opportunity to develop themselves. And we cannot do that all by ourselves. When we feel an employee needs more support than we can offer ourselves, we call in external support. Actually, coaching is a job in itself, so why not call in expertise – which may be external – but with people who really have the experience to help someone further in concrete terms? A coach who really works with people day in day out, and who also does this in other organisations, is going to be able to offer support much more from his own experience.”
“It’s actually a specific skill, coaching, so why not call on expertise – which may be external – but with people who really have that experience to help someone concretely move forward?”
How did the collaboration with Square Circle go? Was there anything noteworthy you’d like to share?
“We always started with an intake interview. And we immediately felt – that time was taken to ask questions from different angles so that we got to the heart of the problem. What we also like is that you can offer different profiles as coaches. Depending on the problem, we can then choose a coach who is the best match. We then put you in contact with the coachee, and if that clicks, you’re off. We don’t have to stay so close to it because we know it’s going well and if there would be something, you signal it. And most importantly, we also see results in people.”
“We shouldn’t stay so close to it because we know it is going well and if there would be something, you signal it.”
Would you recommend these cooperation to HR colleagues?
“Yes definitely. The added value is that you have a very broad spectrum of areas in which you can provide guidance. And that you are reliable: the agreements that are made are really kept. You are also open and transparent, so if at any point something is not going well, or if we come up with certain questions, you take the time to solve it.”
Are you, like Sofie Vlaeminck, looking for professional support in a transition within your company or team? We give you access to more than 25 years of
practical experience in HR and Communications. Want to meet to see what we can do for you? We do this while maintaining the strictest confidentiality. Book a no-obligation mini-consultation right away or contact us via our website.
by Katrien Decroos | Dec 8, 2022 | All, Communication
Rudy Coenen joins the team of Katrien Decroos, An Dewaele and Ludovic Goethals with a communication expertise forged by 20 years of experience in leading companies in various sectors such as banking, insurance, asset management, the public sector, training, energy and associations.
With a career marked by diversity, Rudy has been able to embrace all the finer points of the professions linked to corporate communication. He has held several positions related to communication in a broad sense, up to the final responsibility of a communication department. He puts his know-how at the service of companies wishing to engage in a constructive dialogue with all their stakeholders.
At Square Circle, Rudy will use his talents to help companies facing changes and transformations to develop engaging and human communication with a particular focus on exchange, transparency and relational aspects. He will also actively participate in the communication training programme developed by Square Circle and by himself during his career.
Rudy Coenen: “What attracted me to Square Circle, apart from the solid expertise of the partners, was the integrated approach to Human Resources and Communication issues. Starting with a situation, a project or a need related to the human factor in the company, Square Circle will develop a complete solution that will encompass the typical HR or communication aspects in a totally integrated manner in line with the client’s needs. Such an approach is much more effective than the traditional approach where HR or communication experts or consultants go their separate ways”.
