The WHY and HOW of the CEO blog at Grundfos

A short WHY and HOW of the Grundfos internal blog written by

CEO Mads NipperJanuary 2015

Experienced and written by Thomas Asger HansenDepartment Head of Grundfos Global Working Culture

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WHY and HOW in words

WHY it was started

1. Get to know the new CEO at another level (employee perspective)

2. Easy way to amplify messages and signal direction (max reach and ROCI: Return On Communication Investment)

3. ‘Walk the talk’ of wanting real dialogue with all employees (CEO is accessible, employees feel at level/more connected)

HOW to do it

1. Understand what you want to achieve: Enterprise family (sometimes happy family

celebrations, sometimes tough decisions and hard messages)

Strategy or Planning (theme focus e.g. customer centricity, enterprise efficiency, etc)

2. Have a strategy for making it easy for yourself to engage: Short post, sometimes in breaks between meetings, Not too perfect, don’t panic if you make a spelling

mistake – it just reduces fear of engaging from an employee perspective!

Choose your replies, don’t reply to all replies; blog community will also ‘auto-moderate’ itself

Get digitally literate, know how to use mobile phone to post and engage (like, reply, pictures/video)

3. No ghost-writing, if you want to remain credible and authentic, and learn something your self.

Example, employee view which is also embedded in the Grundfos Intranet

1000+

Case 1: Enterprise Family Culture “The CEO welcome”The Board of Management decided to celebrate the arrival of the new CEO by treating all employees – high and low – with an ice cream!

Under usual circumstances everyone would have enjoyed their ice-cream in the local departments and that would have been the end of the initiative.

However, a lot of employees and company leaders changed the initiative to become a company wide shared experience, because they started to post pictures from their local happy-hours and say thank you in public.

So, without planning for it, the isolated initiatives became a globally connected experience, which created a feeling of togetherness and shared excitement about saying welcome to a new CEO.

Evaluating the overall outcome, the whole series of events showed an unexpected upside on two key parameters;

1. Productivity (Output/Input), was up, since the motivation and engagement reached a new level compared to the initial plan.

2. Organizational culture was strengthened on not only ‘enterprise family feeling’ but also the visible signal that everyone could contribute and engage directly on Mads’ blog – without asking for permission or feeling ‘out of line’.

Mads’s post in his blog“As you may know, Group Management decided that all employees will get an ice cream early August. Officially, this is to mark my real start date in Grundfos, but I like to think of it more as a small, symbolic celebration of the summer and return from holiday for most of us.

In any case, it is important to remember the small celebrations like this one. In Danish business culture, there is little tradition to celebrate. My belief is that small, inexpensive celebrations are not only OK - they are necessary. They bring team spirit and a feeling of appreciation and belonging, and I am sure all employees are smart enough to know that a celebration or recognition does not necessarily mean that everything is fantastic... But they will feel appreciated and motivated to do even better to hit or exceed our targets.

Back to the ice cream: I got a picture of the ice cream that all Chinese employees will get. Our Chinese office administration manager has taken a great initiative to personalize these ice creams. And I have to admit that I am proud to be featured on an ice cream -something I would not have dreamt of when I was child! Thank you! :-) “

RECIPE & INGREDIENTS

An inspiring event

One shared place to talk and comment

Trust - that your open public comment is appreciated

Case 2: Openly addressing a strategic theme“Let’s simplify and speed-up”Grundfos is known for a culture of excellence. One of the very good characteristics and consequences of such a culture is that the organization is used to deliver excellent and high quality products or services.

One of the potential challenges is that the hard core pursuit of excellence and quality is imposed on everything that goes on, no matter the cost or consequence.As an employee you become speed-blind in at least a couple of ways: 1] You are so tuned in on the excellence parameter, that you do not think of – or dare – to question products, services, or processes which are so perfect they demand way too many resources compared to what they should.2] You become unapt at designing lean products, services, or processes because it’s typically ‘all or nothing’. The simple lean tool or process is considered culturally unacceptable.

All in all, your organization can become too heavy on a number of parameters, and the change management task is quite vast.

So how do you take the best from the existing culture and find ways to introduce new perspectives without creating a chaos? You address it openly through real life examples.

RECIPE & INGREDIENTS

A business critical theme

Courage to address painful issues openly

One real life example

A broad call for action or reflection

Employee taking the example to the strategic level.

Mads energizes the feed-back loop…..

…from his phone!

An employee ads context and more depth to the example

An employee supports the discussion by confirming a match

between theme and reality.

Employee proposing solution to specific example.

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