Inspiring
people

Making organizations more humane

Companies that make the best use of their employees’ potential will succeed in the long term. This requires a clear People strategy. Close to the business and with the employees in mind. Only a powerful HR organization can achieve this goal: from recruiting and people development to performance management. To successfully implement it, cooperation with managers and employees is crucial. It turns process into culture.

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Workforce Transformation

Which of the changes in the labor market and their consequences for business are we facing in this decade? Find out in our major survey and series of events in cooperation with the Bundesverband der Personalmanager:innen e.V. (BPM).

Solutions

What we do

People &
HR Strategy

What will the business and working environment of the future look like for your company? What does this mean for your structures and working methods, your employees and their skills? What can HR and managers do to prepare for change?

An effective Peope & HR strategy requires more than just considering the employee life cycle. It only becomes truly effective through business proximity. It supports employees and leaders in their daily work. The result is a roadmap with a clear focus: impact before activism.

HR
Transformation

Which offers will HR provide in the future? How will business and employee need to change? What roles and skills will be required in HR? How to best use your HR IT?

Successful HR transformations enable you to unleash the full potential of your employees. Your HR organization needs a future-oriented operating model. Clear communication and true enablement make your HR transformation attractive to employees as well.

Culture, Diversity
& Change

We need more customer proximity, faster decisions, more innovation! What does a corporate culture look like that achieves this? And how do we move in the right direction?

In this business context, diversity and change management get attention of leaders. If the goal is clear, the need for change can be identified. Decisive success factors: Role modelling by leaders, adapting the rules of engagement – and initiatives that create pull from frontline employees.

Recruiting &
Talent Management

How do you find enough suitable employees? Why do candidates decide to work for your company? How do you ensure that your employees are committed and grow?

A talent strategy helps to select the right tools. Depending on your company’s situation and culture, different philosophies can apply: popular or elite sports, plan or market? In any case, the processes and solutions should be truly user oriented.

Learning &
Leadership Development

What skills does a company need for the future? Which learning offers best develop the skills of your leaders and experts? And what do you do when large groups of employees need to learn new things quickly, as, for example, in the course of the Workforce Transformation in large up- und reskilling programs?

Lifelong learning ensures your company’s success and makes your employees better. A strategic plan points the way. And learning opportunities associated with business initiatives bring learning where it is most effective for adults: in day-to-day business.

Performance Management &
Compensation

What control and incentives do you need to increase the performance of your organization? How crucial is the contribution of teams and individual employees? What does an effective performance management process look like? And how does it interact with your other HR processes?

A clear performance philosophy helps to design the processes correctly and to eliminate deficits. Where success depends more on cooperation than on the efforts of individuals, performance culture makes the difference. Compensation is an important component in the war for talent – but not the only one!

How we do it

What we achieve with our clients

The project

The business transformation should also be reflected in HR – this was the starting point for our support in the strategic realignment and digitalization of the HR function.

In an iterative process, we worked with the client team to identify the future-oriented HR topics and developed a people strategy that encompasses more than just the introduction of a global HR IT solution. In doing so, the employees were always clearly in the center of attention and we were able to create transparency about a future globally uniform HR service offering.

In addition, the range of skills we developed in the course of the HR IT implementation not only conveys digital skills and system knowledge, but also actively anchors the new HR role understanding throughout the entire organization.

A moment that mattered

When we examined the vision, mission and initiatives of the new business strategy point by point from a people perspective, we collected many post-its with ideas how to support implementation from the people side: How can we increase diversity in our sales organization to succeed with our multi-channel strategy? How must technical operations be organized to become a cost leader? Typical HR topics were thus given a clear business reference which allowed for focus and clear prioritization.

Our impact

Thanks to a clear prioritization of strategic HR topics, our client manages to achieve success in a structured and continuous manner despite limited resources. It’s nice to see that the entire HR community has grown together in this project and that the HR strategy and the HR operating model are actually brought to life.

The project

As part of a sales push program, we supported the responsible Management Board member in the development and introduction of a foundational training programs for the most important sales roles globally.

Together with a team of experts from various sales areas and the learning function, we defined a company-wide “Way of Selling”, described typical sales roles and identified the most important learning needs with the target groups. It resulted in a sales-specific learning curriculum with four role-specific programs at the center. All programs contained on-the-job learning elements for the direct application of what was learned, linked to the initial sales push approach. Digital learning offers complemented the “blended learning approach”. Subsequently, we helped to build up training partners for localization and delivery in 15 different country clusters and to ensure the anchoring of the programs in the different business units through systematic communication and controlling.

A moment that mattered

A role-specific sales curriculum across business areas from product sales to large plant business, is that possible? The scepticism was significant – until customers interviews revealed significant differences in selling style between representatives of our client, resulting in customer confusion and brand dilution. And when one of the most frequent participant feedbacks in the pilot training was: “I have learned a lot from colleagues from other business units,” most sceptics were convinced.

Our impact

In the first program run, participants have identified and converted leads worth double-digit millions of EUR. By now, thousands of sales employees have completed the global learning programs and noticeably improved the methodological quality and consistency of sales activities.

The project

Our client wanted to revise its performance management system and implement a new process for over 7,000 employees across five divisions. The aim was to replace a backward-looking system with focus on remuneration which was politically abused with a development-oriented one.

We developed the concept in integrated teams, coordinated it with various stakeholders (extended Executive Board, HR organization, works council) and supported its implementation. Validation with the target group itself (managers and employees) in workshops was a clear success factor. In addition, the empowerment of senior and middle managers through motivating communication and intensive monitoring of the cultural change played a decisive role in ensuring that the new performance development system was actually lived by everyone.

Our impact

The most important changes were the abolition of ratings and the introduction of more regular feedback with a clear focus on strengths as well as the decoupling of compensation. This was also very positively evaluated in the organization: the more intensive use of feedback and the stronger focus on development by managers was highlighted in surveys.

Contact us

HR Strategy & Learning
HR Strategy & Learning
Axel Hüttmann
Partner, Head of People Practice
 Talent & Performance Management
Talent & Performance Management
Thekla Kovacev-Schmidt
Associate Principal
HR Transformation & Organization
HR Transformation & Organization
Moritz Schmidt
Associate Principal
Strategic Workforce Transformation
Strategic Workforce Transformation
Stefan Ulrich
Principal