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 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 | 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 | Nov 2, 2022 | All, Communication, Transformation
Victor has to announce some changes in his department. He has spent hours preparing 58 slides to explain the objectives, the new structure and the rationale for the change. In short, Victor is very satisfied with his presentation and so is his boss. On the announcement day, his employees listened to Victor. In a deafening silence.
Silence is the primary form of resistance
In the weeks that followed Victor continued to ‘defend’ his project. Always with the same words, the same ideas, the same concepts.
Six months later, the project is still not operational. Three employees have left. There are still gaps in the structure. Nothing is going well. The morale of the troops is close to zero. And Victor is seriously thinking of leaving the company too. ‘They don’t want to change’, he told his boss. ‘They don’t want to understand’. ‘They are resisting’.
Words and numbers
The presentation’s 3,400 words, 27 tables and graphs did not convince his employees. Worse still, they sowed doubt in the minds of the employees. Because the story Victor told was about him, the management and the company. Not them. They felt excluded from the project from the start.
On the very day of the presentation, the project took a nosedive. What followed was the chronicle of a predicted failure.
Victor did not know:
- That words create mental images, produced by our brain
- That only strong mental images, which resonate within us, make us ‘move’
- because they appeal to our reason but also to the emotion we feel
- That an emotion that is well experienced by employees opens the door to trust and commitment, a requirement for any change
- That the majority of ‘managerial’ words commonly used in communication during transformations do not succeed in convincing because of their lack of content and human feeling: in short, they do not create the mental images that will have an impact.
Convincing is about making words speak
Victor signed up for a ‘convincing through communication’ training course. He wants to learn how to use the words that will create the right mental images to engage employees in change. In other words, he wants to learn how to communicate for them and not for himself. He is ready to abandon his classic managerial lexicon which does not work, because it is meaningless for most people. Starting from what his employees feel, he will focus on the ‘real’ words, the mental images that speak and that will make his team evolve.
In short, Victor will learn to convince by communicating!
He has made it his mission to succeed in the next change mission. Because he has changed employer. And he has been given a major transformation project.
If you have to communicate in your professional life, wake up the Victor in you… you’ll be surprised by the result!
by Katrien Decroos | Jul 16, 2021 | Communication, HR & People Solutions, Risk & Crisis, Strategy, Transformation
In a company, persuasion is a daily necessity. Changing operating methods, launching new ideas, successfully completing transformation projects, improving quality, ensuring safety at work, selling new products to customers, successful negotiation… This often requires investing a lot of energy for a result that does not always meet expectations. And there’s a reason for that: We do not use the ‘persuasion machine’ present in the form of the three brains that make up any human being.
The 3 brains that govern us
Did you know that the process of persuading a human being involves engaging the three brains that he possesses? Unfortunately, when we want to persuade, most of the time we deploy arguments that use just a small part of the first brain. So we shouldn’t be surprised that the impact of our communication is often unpredictable!
Our first brain is the one everyone knows. It contains 100 billion neurons. It is composed of two hemispheres. Simply put, the left side is essentially rational. It wants to understand everything, analyse everything and make a detailed assessment of the information provided to it, step by step. You should also realise that the left side does not want to take any risks. This is the origin of the resistance to change that one naturally observes in humans.
We all have a right brain hemisphere which is our spatial, creative, visual, relational side. It anticipates constantly. It is ready to take risks, without much calculation about them.
It works through mental images. Concepts, ideas, projects are all mental images, sometimes complex, that our brain has to decode.
A beneficial interaction
It was long thought that the two sides of the brain functioned with one being dominant over the other. At times either basically rational. Or then again, more emotional. But it has recently become clear that this is not the case at all. The two hemispheres are in constant interaction and continuously influence each other. When you communicate, you create a real ‘battle’ of the hemispheres in the hope that the outcome will be favourable to you.
Your communication will therefore be aimed at reassuring the left side of your target audience about the relevance of the arguments in order to control the analytical phase of reasoning. In doing so, your communication will also need to convey the ‘mental images’ that will lead to buy-in by the right side and then to action.
But never forget this: persuading an audience requires not only rational arguments, which is what 99% of managers do most of the time.
Rationality often fails to convince
Our second brain consists of our heart and our digestive system. It is composed of 540 million neurons. This second brain is the centre of our emotions. The most important decisions we make in our lives are initially processed by the two hemispheres of the first brain. But then, quite often it is based on ‘our gut feeling’ that we ultimately decide to go ahead or not, by ‘sensing’ that it’s the right decision.
In your communication you will therefore also have to integrate emotional arguments (the ‘what’s in it for me’) and action-orientated arguments to ‘move people’. By addressing the second brain and its emotional power of persuasion in this way, you double your persuasive impact.
A brain that remains little known
But there is also a third brain. This is made up of 300 billion glial cells that surround our first brain. These cells, whose name is related to the English word for ‘glue’, are specialised in various tasks: supporting neurons, supplying them with nutrients, accelerating neurotransmission, for example. We are only just now discovering the full potential of this veritable third brain.
One of the first applications we can draw from this is that the energy released by the glial cells decreases over time. A wise manager will therefore hold important meetings at the beginning of the week and at the beginning of the day rather than at the end of the week or at the end of the afternoon, because most brains will have difficulty concentrating, as the available energy has been partly exhausted.
If you want to have the energy and interaction to conduct a fruitful discussion, plan your meetings with the glial cells in mind!
Persuade by communicating
Persuasion through communication is within everyone’s reach. There’s no reason why you can’t make your persuasive power even stronger by from now on targeting the 3 brains of anyone you want to persuade. Want to find out how? Click here.
by Georges Vandenhove | Sep 24, 2020 | All, Social Dialogue, Transformation
Necessary and painful evil or laying the foundation for your future?
The present economic consequences of the severe health crisis are leading to many social negotiations between the social partners in organizations. Leadership and employee representatives should aim to get most out of these social negotiations in order to do what is best for their customers, their employees and their shareholders.
Since decades this process is difficult and considered painful by both sides, a ‘necessary evil’. Clever companies and employee representatives are getting much more out of this versus those that are stuck in the old rhetoric of us and them. After two decades of multiple negotiations I have seen organizations who come out of this stronger and those who are merely solving an immediate problem and very often end up in the same situation sooner than later.
Abandoning the old roads of conflict in social negotiations
There is a best way of approaching negotiations and leaving decades of conflictual relationships behind us. More and more participants in such negotiations are courageous enough to abandon the old roads of conflict: putting each other under pressure, getting upset with each other and then eventually reaching an agreement because they have no other choice. That is what I call the lose/lose scenario. In such a set up employee representatives say they never get involved correctly and management sees the process as something painful and difficult delaying the necessary changes that need to take place.
Presently many negotiations about organizational changes and restructurings are on the drawing tables so it is timely to look into this. Company and employee representatives who do this well have the capacity to look at the bigger picture. They do not just focus on the issue at hand and try to understand why they are where they are and what needs to be done to get back on track building the longer term future for their customers, employees and shareholders. They find out how to engage in a new social contract after the present negotiation, they look at work to be done as an investment into the future, even in case of layoffs or heavy restructuring. The realize this is not just an administrative process to go through, on the contrary they know it is putting in place the foundation for their future.
You don’t necessarily need to agree on everything
Effective negotiation processes are done with parties at the table who get each other involved, who get input from all around the table, who realize that those involved do not necessarily need to agree on everything, they just need to make sure they move forward together for the benefit of all stakeholders in the process. Individuals who can put their ego’s aside and focus on the essence are key to success. They inform each other correctly and communicate openly about their issues. They also make sure they do not put the other side with the back against the wall and do not have white rabbits jumping out of hats.
Surprising each other in such negotiation exercises is really not advisable. Parties need to keep their cool and need to realize that getting out of this process together, not leaving the other one behind is the only way forward in the long term. If one stakeholder gets it all and the other one does not get anything it is merely a matter of time before you are back at the negotiation table.
Employee representatives most often defend the status quo, no change and no big departure from how things are happening so far. That is obviously not very realistic with the economic damage a lot of organizations are experiencing today. Leaders very often put plans on the table they have worked for months at and do not realize that for employee representatives it is just undoable to understand and agree with them in some meetings.
It always takes two to tango
A well negotiated and balanced deal always gets the better long term consequences. Trying to understand each other’s position and frame of reference is crucial. At the negotiation table there is no place for people who are dogmatic, not able to listen and not able to depart from existing views on the situation.
It always takes two to tango. The most ideal profile for a social negotiator is just a decent human being who is able to listen, learn, share, respect differences of opinion and looking for a solution where all parties can find themselves in. It is also a person who has a sense of urgency as most of the time the topics on the table require rather fast action. Interestingly enough this is the description for both employee and management representatives at the table, there is no distinction between parties with regard to the personal characteristics they should have.
When preparing for such a negotiation, think about what you would do if you were in the shoes of the other party, it will help you get well prepared. However difficult things get never lose your calm, stay focused and always keep the door open. Decisions will come faster and agreements will be reached earlier working like this. This is not about putting the other party as much as possible under pressure through getting the press involved for instance, or to drop service to the customers of the business, tactics unions often use, this is also not about forcing predefined actions down the negotiation tube and explaining there is no other alternative.
