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How to Guide
Reaching Non-DeskBased Employees
A Case Study
Formica Group Europe
In association with Laura Barbour
Reaching Non-Desk Employees – A Case Study: Formica Group Europe
Contents
Introduction03
The Background
04
The Challenges
05
The Recovery Plan: Communicating it and Engaging Employees
06
The Path to Engagement
08
Awareness08
Introducing the Weekly Informed
08
Introducing Read Me
08
Understanding08
Introducing Team Talk
08
The Outcome… So Far
10
Epilogue11
About the Author
02
11
Reaching Non-Desk Employees – A Case Study: Formica Group Europe
Introduction
One of the biggest challenges facing many
companies is to ensure they have effective
communication systems in place to reach and
engage employees right across the organization,
whether they are desk-based in HQ, at regional
locations, or not as digitally connected as some
of their colleagues.
Reaching the latter poses a particularly difficult challenge and is one that’s very familiar to Laura Barbour,
European Employee Engagement Manager for Formica Group Europe.
When she joined FGE in 2015 the task she faced was daunting:
• The company was in financial trouble and morale was on the floor
• The latest employee engagement scores were terrible
• Confidence in company leaders was very low
• She was the sole internal communicator
• It was very difficult to reach employees as most were shop floor workers who were not digitally
connected and weren’t allowed to have phones while on duty
How Laura and the team at Formica Group Europe took on these challenges was the subject of a fascinating
Poppulo webinar last year, which prompted us to produce this case study given the interest it generated.
We are very grateful for Laura’s input and cooperation and the support of her Formica colleagues.
We hope you find their story as helpful as it is interesting.
Tim Vaughan
Head of Content
Poppulo
03
Reaching Non-Desk Employees – A Case Study: Formica Group Europe
The Background
Formica Group Europe is a leading provider
of branded, designed surfacing solutions for
commercial and residential customers worldwide.
As the world’s largest manufacturer of High Pressure
Laminate (HPL), its international network of design,
manufacturing, distribution and sales operations
maintains the recognition of Formica® as a global
brand.
In May 2007, the Formica Group of companies was
acquired by Fletcher Building, one of Australia’s and
New Zealand’s largest building companies. The
acquisition resulted in the creation of the world’s
largest manufacturer of decorative surfaces and
high-pressure laminate.
Change was not restricted to employees: 80% of
the leadership team was replaced in a period of
six months and the first steps of a recovery plan
were put in place by interim CEO, Mitch Quint, (CEO
of North America and who had turned around that
business). As part of Mitch’s ‘six priority focus’ the
company’s UK plant in North Shields, where 60% of
material is manufactured was key to recovery.
Formica Group Europe employs 1,000 people in the
UK, Finland, France, Sweden and Spain. As in many
traditional manufacturing industries, it struggled to
be profitable during the recession of the early years
of the past decade. From being in a position where
it dominated the market in the 60s, 70s and 80s, and
was under pressure to keep up with demand for its
products, the collapse of the construction industry
had a sudden and massively negative impact on
Formica’s fortunes.
It was suddenly losing money, was under new
ownership and this resulted in a drive for efficiency,
innovation, cost reduction and an increase in
productivity. “And with all that comes a need to
engage employees,” says Laura Barbour, European
Employee Engagement Manager, Formica Group
Europe.
04
80%
of the leadership team was
replaced in a period of
six months
Reaching Non-Desk Employees – A Case Study: Formica Group Europe
The Challenges
The need for quick and fundamental change to
progress to a path of recovery came against a
backdrop of low employee engagement, a heavily
unionized workforce, poor communication and lack of
employee trust in the previous company leadership.
The communication and engagement difficulties were
exacerbated by the fact that prior to Laura Barbour’s
appointment in 2015 the company had nobody
working in Internal Communications and there were
no formal channels of communication in place.
On top of that, 800 of the 1,000 employees were
‘non-wired’, working in production facilities, with no
access to digital technology and, for safety reasons,
employees are not allowed use phones on the
factory floor. So, the majority of workers did not
have active email accounts and didn’t have mobile
devices to receive company communications.
And being a heavily unionized organization
(two unions at the UK plant, five in Spain) posed
additional communications challenges: there was
little or no ability, or appetite from employees to
communicate outside of work hours, compounding
the difficulty in communicating with them at work.
When they were in the workplace, shopfloor teams
work in shifts over 24 hours: 7am-3pm; 3pm-11pm and
11pm-7am. Many work in pairs, at a physical distance
from others due to the practicalities of production,
and they wear protective hearing devices, which aids
employee safety but inhibits communication.
Additionally, the majority of employees only speak
their own local language (Finnish, Spanish, French,
Swedish) so the ability to push out communications
in one language (English) was non-existent – even
if the company had a well-resourced internal
communications department.
05
So, even with the development of a recovery plan,
it faced difficulties in communicating it and ‘selling’
it to a disengaged workforce. Even the scale of the
troubles being experienced by the company hadn’t
been properly communicated or understood prior to
the appointment of the new leadership team.
For example, overtime was a big cost, but while
production staff thought they were being asked to
work extra hours due to high product demand, one
of the principal reasons was wastage due to the high
levels of scrap.
At the peak point, one in every 10 laminate boards
being produced was scrapped, and overtime had
to be paid as a consequence – a huge cost the
company could ill-afford in a deep recession. But
the operatives hadn’t made the connection between
overtime and scrap – and it hadn’t been pointed out
to them by management.
To compound matters further, the previous employee
engagement survey made for difficult reading and
outlined the extent of the challenges facing Formica:
Confidence in
senior leadership
employee
engagement
absence rate
of almost
“We also had a very broken union relationship,”
recalls Laura Barbour, reflecting on challenges
she and her colleagues faced when she joined
Formica in 2015. Decades of lack of investment in
the production presses had taken their toll, but to
convince the parent company Fletcher Building to
make these investments a viable recovery plan had
to be put in place, quickly and effectively.
Reaching Non-Desk Employees – A Case Study: Formica Group Europe
The Recovery Plan: Communicating
it and Engaging Employees
In looking at a vision, “Mitch’s arrival started to
change everything. He set the goals and priorities:
we needed to recover service, get into the operations
and make sure the service we provide is at a level
that we can sell. So, it’s commercial, it’s competitive
and we reduce scrap,” said Laura.
Her contribution to the recovery plan was to build
an employee engagement plan, while her HR
colleague, Michelle Robson’s focus was on building
the relationships with the unions and developing an
overall people plan.
Paul Foreman (COO) and Tyler Fenwick (new Plant
Manager) focused on the operational recovery plan.
“So we now had our recovery plan, we had a year to
make it work and we were told to just crack on with
it – so 80% of my job was about the turnaround at
North Shields”, explained Laura.
Building better, together
Be bold
Play fair
Better every
day
Customer
Leading
People
Customer
Efficiency
Growth
Service model recovery and
enhancement
Sales and Marketing alignment
to commercial opportunities
Manufacturing effectiveness
Pricing simplification
and governance
Product line simplification
Organization streamlining
Increase the value of Fletcher Building
06
As the new engagement program was being
developed, the engagement scores came before the
recovery plan and they were not pretty.
“It was about a month after I started, and the new
HR Manager for the UK, Michelle Robson had been
there only a week. We just sat there going through
the scores. I mean, in the corporate world you rarely
see zeros, but in all the 65 questions that were asked
the majority of them were under 50% and a few
areas as low as 10 and 13%.”
So, the first thing we did was to set up listening
sessions with three different sets of people, three
different audiences:
• Those we could see had a strong opinions and
who would be very vocal
• Those who might be more middle of the road
and less vocal
• Those who we thought would have a more
positive and optimistic outlook
We wanted to get each of these groups in a room
separately to see if we saw a common theme. But
because confidence in senior leadership was so
low in the engagement survey, it was decided that
it would be better if leaders did not attend the
listening sessions, leaving it to Laura Barbour and
Michelle Robson to conduct the meetings – they
would more likely be viewed by the employees as
being more impartial.
Reaching Non-Desk Employees – A Case Study: Formica Group Europe
Here’s some of the feedback:
We’re worried, not
about if we close,
but when we close.
No one comes
in to try to make
scrap.
If I have an idea
I don’t know what
to do with it.
Morale
is ugly.
If you make a
mistake you are
singled out by the
shift managers.
“When we walked into the room I genuinely believed a lot of those people thought they were going to
get sacked because they had expressed an opinion in a confidential survey and that we knew what their
comments were,” said Laura. “So, as a result, the first half hour of each meeting was spent trying to convince
them that this wasn’t the case.”
“We had to spend a lot of time trying to build up their trust so that they would open up to us and give us their
honest opinions.”
The feedback we got was that this team of people looked highly disengaged on paper, but actually
when you were speaking to them they had ideas, they wanted to improve, they were saying things like
‘we don’t come in here to make scrap’, whereas that wasn’t the perception when you looked at the
survey.
– Laura Barbour
From this feedback, and with her area of responsibility resting on engagement, she built a model focusing on
five elements:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Make sure people become aware of what’s happening around them
Give people the opportunity to check and gain an understanding
Ensure people feel that they are supported
Get people involved
Check on their commitment
These are designed to get them involved in shaping the future of the business. “Each channel had a group
of champions, so I had a group of guys from different shifts and we’d sit around a table, and I’d be listening
to how they worked, how they operated, how they came on site, to try to understand the opportunities to
engage.”
07
Reaching Non-Desk Employees – A Case Study: Formica Group Europe
The Path to Engagement
Awareness
“After our listening sessions we launched three
things. But first a bit of background.
The window of opportunity to engage with the shop
floor workers was very limited. They arrive on site
five minutes before their shift and change into their
protective gear, then they go on the floor, get a quick
briefing and are then put working on a machine.
You have lost the opportunity to engage or
communicate with them until their break, which
is personal time for them so you can’t fill it with
corporate news.
“The question we asked ourselves was, how can we
use that five-minute window of opportunity before
they go on the shop floor to deliver the message
they need to receive? And we also have to do this
consistently across three shifts.
So, Laura and the duty manager Tom Ditchburn
designed a Communication Station, like a physical
newsstand, with sections for different categories
of news: one for information relevant to the entire
Fletcher Building company, a section relevant to
Europe (financial results and other announcements)
and at the top a section with local information
relevant to the specific plant.
Each week we clear all the boxes so if there
is no information to get out the communication
stand is empty, and people notice it then when
we populate it with the information sheets.
– Laura Barbour
08
“Our aim was to create a channel for sharing basic
information that was as effective as possible for
them. They could grab any of the info sheets that
interested them and read it if they came in early, or
at their break, or take it home.”
Introducing the Weekly Informed
The second Awareness channel to be created was
a weekly Informed sheet, initially to articulate and
disseminate information around the recovery plan.
This information was accessible to workers in HQ
through channels like Yammer, but not to the 100
operatives on each shift. The Informed sheet is
updated each week and now includes ‘shout-outs’
and ‘well-done’ messages.
Introducing Read Me
This was introduced around serving any structural
updates, when the company was changing around
80% of its leadership and the drive for efficiencies
that flowed from the recovery plan – so a channel
to talk about people was needed. It’s now used
for strategic updates on our six priorities as well as
people changes.
Understanding
Introducing Team Talk
Team Talks involved taking staff off the shop floor
every six weeks for a year, focusing on the recovery
plan. This channel can look ‘free’ but in comparative
terms, taking 300 employees off the shop floor for
an hour was the equivalent of 27 production days for
one person.
Reaching Non-Desk Employees – A Case Study: Formica Group Europe
“If you are using that amount of time , you need to
make sure you’re driving the right outcome. Team
Talk was focused mostly on the recovery plan, the
capex investment and helping the team understand
our business and what was happening.
“We got great feedback from the unions and teams
after our first Team Talk so we had to continue the
momentum every six weeks, to really take time with
the Q & As, just getting in front of them and giving
them a commercial understanding of the business,”
she said.
Following on from the introduction of the full
site Team Talks, this year they launched smaller
Department Team Talks. The latest engagement
results had shown an increase in vision scores but
not in relation to their own department.
The introduction of the smaller department talks
focus on issues relating to themselves and their work,
people changes and any issues that they wanted to
highlight, talk about or ask questions about.
“The dialogue increased significantly when you
compare the number of questions asked in a
Department Team Talk to the full sites ones. We
would get between 20 and 30 questions per session.
It was like having a conversation and it brought the
dialogue right down to the local level, ” said Laura.
On the Commitment channel, the company launched
Listening Sessions across Europe, taking people
off the shop floor every time they got engagement
results, to take the time to discuss their job and what
is standing in their way.
Another innovation was the introduction of the Better
Together Awards, where employees can submit
ideas and suggestions. This initiative was introduced
in response to the feedback from workers that they
were not listened and had no forum for the ideas
they had to offer.
09
The awards were introduced in the expectation
that while leaders had a recovery plan, most of the
production ideas were going to come from the shop
floor.
Anybody can submit an idea, and a winner is chosen
every eight weeks – and that person wins a week’s
pay as a prize!
“We really wanted to generate that open ears
approach to ‘if you have a good idea we want to
recognize it’,” says Laura. “The Plant Manager also
looked at how to put in more support in how we
sponsor the ideas, given that a lot of the suggestions
that the guys put forward are ideas that are out of
their full control to implement, so it needs support of
leaders in order to put them in place.”
Reaching Non-Desk Employees – A Case Study: Formica Group Europe
The Outcome… So Far
“So ultimately did it pay off? Our first year, a year after our recovery plan, we had seen an increase of 47%
in confidence for our senior leadership. Senior leadership communicating a vision for the future had gone up
41%, but we are talking about coming from a low base.
“Still, it was fantastic to see all the effort that we put in had paid off, and in a way we banked it. We said,
‘okay we were on the right track’, the recovery team in a way went back to business as usual, and I went
back to how I can implement this model as a whole of Europe project. How do I take this success at North
Shields, and make it relevant for Spain, Finland and Sweden,” said Laura.
On top of the actual engagement results, scrap had gone down from 9-10% to 4%. And the company saved
2.1 million NZD (US$1.5m) in one year alone on absence, as a result of a focus on employee education
and managing absence. Furthermore, an investment of stg£40m was secured from the parent company.
In addition, relations with the unions had improved greatly.
I have confidence in the senior
leadership to make the right decisions
for this company.
28%
75%
22%
Senior leadership has communicated
a vision of the future that motivates me
63%
Senior leadership demonstrates
that employees are important to the
success of this company.
34%
74%
Senior leadership is in touch with
the views, opinions and needs of
employees.*
16%
51%
43%
I feel informed about this company
and its activities.*
69%
Before
10
Team 2016
Reaching Non-Desk Employees – A Case Study: Formica Group Europe
Epilogue
The engagements the following year, 2017, showed
slippage. Many of the areas where we had improved
(senior leadership, communication and vision)
had stayed the same – which was great, but we
had clearly new areas to focus on (management
effectiveness and training).
“It’s not really the end of the plan, I would say it
is the end of the beginning. I think the plan will
always involve what we have created in our first
year with the guys, an appetite and a belief that we
will change it. It would be great to see big hikes in
improvement year on year but in reality we want to
see consistent incremental step changes in the areas
we focus on,” says Laura.
I think in 2016 the lesson we learned is that
you can’t just bank the success and expect
to maintain engagement. You’ve got to try to
take it to the next level and look at what other
areas you need to improve.
– Laura Barbour
“If you are looking at working with non-wired,
manufacturing employees you’ve got to remember
these are people who often do not get a chance to
express their voice. People who can’t simply stop
what they are doing to go and ask a question or talk
to someone. So the first thing you must do is really
understand them and their work, before you can
expect them to understand you.
So, it had to be that kind of mutual cooperation and
collaboration on what people think we need to fix,
and what the business thinks we need to fix.
When you look at non-wired employees, you truly
need to design channels that work for them, and that
is getting into “how do they get on site, how do they
get onto the shop floor, how many minutes is that
window of opportunity for engagement, do they care
about business when it comes to their break time?
We don’t put things there in their canteen areas,
because that is where they want to have a break. It’s
really stepping into their shoes and looking at what
kind of framework will work for them.”
About the Author
Laura Barbour has 20+ years of experience in the Internal Comms field. Laura has worked
in an assortment of industries including water, oil, social housing and financial services. She
is now European Employee Engagement Manager for Formica Group Europe that has 1,000
employees based across Europe. Moving from 8 years in financial services into non-digital
manufacturing world was a total culture change for her. Over the past 2 years she has
developed an undying passion for communicating in the operational industry, especially
when targeting engagement for non-wired/manufacturing employees.
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