Better Together

Situation/Problem: Foodvest/Findus/Youngs had recently merged several food businesses to create the second largest European food manufacturer with factories in England, Scotland, Sweden and Norway. The new head office was Grimsby in the UK and the decision was made to use their email platform, this was different than many of the other sites. The risk was that inefficient or ineffective work would occur due to lack of skills or resistance to the overall change. 

What Was Done:   Jason Reed designed and managed a program for training & communications to support an organisation wide implementation of a new email client, engaging training resources liaising with stakeholders, requesting, and incorporating a corporate change messaging, designing and engaging program administration, evaluation and quality control. 

Outcome/Benefit: End-users trained in-use of new communication solution and important change messages communicated to newly merged divisions. 

Jason’s Reflection and Learning: It is interesting to think that organisation’s used to train people on how to use email. We don’t these days because people are much more digitally literate, although at the same time there may be some missed opportunities for consistency. I know one of the topics we had during the training roll-out was about email usage and approaches.

The great opportunity that we took throughout was to incorporate important change messages and dialogue. The fact that many take-overs and mergers had occurred and people were losing their favourite email package was having an impact on staff. We encouraged our client to acknowledge this and be transparent about the decision making process. The Leader of the organisation agreed to support this approach and enabled our trainers to communicate the message at the beginning of each session. We also used the opportunity to engage with local leaders at regional sites and open conversations with head office.

Overall this had a positive impact, the people in the company were able to use the tool but more than that they felt heard and respected by the company’s leaders. They may not have agreed with the decision to use a new email package, however, the did understand it.