Where they were
Brigade Electronics is a global producer and developer of vehicle and manufacturing safety solutions. Since 1976 they’ve been designing systems to keep people safe on roads and worksites – from reversing alarms to 360º cameras – and lobbying in favour of vehicle safety regulations.
For the last few years Brigade had been on an impressive growth journey, passing £50 million turnover and rising. But in 2021 employee survey results had led to concerns about achieving their next growth target, and they needed help setting up their leaders to support continued growth and innovation.
Externally they were also facing a marketplace that had become far more saturated than any time in Brigade’s history. Competition was increasing, not just from other aftermarket producers but also OEMs, and incoming legislation looked likely to impact Brigade’s business.
Where they needed to get to
In order for Brigade to continue on their trajectory, they needed to find a way of bringing everyone back on board with the growth journey the company was undertaking – beginning with getting to the bottom of why the dynamic within Brigade had become so rocky.
They needed to redefine Brigade’s mission, vision and values, to give everyone absolute clarity about what the company strove for each day both in terms of delivering for its customers and doing right by its people. They also needed to make sure the company was set up for innovation, that they had the right tools, skills and culture to stay ahead of the market even as it evolved and tightened.
And lastly, Brigade needed to make sure that its leaders and managers were equipped with the right skills and behaviours to embed those redefined values into the everyday, and to lead Brigade’s teams to deliver on their strategic ambitions.
How we drew the roadmap
Our work with Brigade followed our award-winning 3-stage culture change methodology. Here’s how that looked in practice:
Stage 1: Insight
The first stage of the project was to help Brigade get a full understanding of their current culture – not only what needed to change, but also what was working well and should be held on to.
During this phase we reviewed Brigade’s previous employee engagement surveys and interviewed people from across the company, including the board and key stakeholders. This helped us to see what was currently hindering Brigade’s culture:
- Teams and people felt they were being managed too tightly and didn’t have the autonomy they needed.
- Siloes prevented teams across multiple European sites from working collaboratively.
- Employees were feeling unappreciated for the work they did.
- Leadership and decision making felt inconsistent on the ground, inhibiting people’s sense of empowerment, creativity and performance.
But this phase also showed a clear sense of what the people inside Brigade found so compelling about the company – chiefly their strong entrepreneurial heritage, history of creating pioneering systems and their “zero lives lost” vision.
What emerged was an understanding that Brigade’s people wanted to see the company embrace their pioneering, innovative culture even more.
Stage 2: Design
Once the insight phase had given us a handle on the challenges they were facing, the next step was to map out a way forward.
We started by working with Brigade to redefine their mission and values. Brigade already had a compelling vision to achieve zero lives lost through collisions with commercial vehicles and mobile machinery, but they needed to make sure everyone in the company – from the most senior leadership to the newest hire – was aligned around the right behaviours to make that possible.
To that end, with a core focus on safety, solving problems with purpose, and supporting their customers, we defined a new set of values that embraced customer centricity, accountability, respect and the company’s strong history of innovative brilliance. To make sure those values were more than just words, we developed a behaviour competency framework that gave everyone clarity on their expectations day to day, and was integrated into performance management.
Finally, we designed an internal comms and engagement plan to support Brigade’s people along the culture change journey, and to better align them with the new culture and behaviours. We reviewed and recommended a new set of culture and engagement metrics for Brigade to measure, so that they could better track the culture shift and gather more meaningful insights into its success.
Stage 3: Embed
With any culture change, making it stick as a long-term reality is always the hardest part – especially for companies like Brigade, who have upwards of 200 people distributed across multiple sites globally.
To kick-start the embedding process, we designed and delivered a cultural immersion event for the whole company. Culture Consultancy facilitated the event, but we worked with the leadership team ahead of time to equip and empower them to lead sessions throughout the event, therefore demonstrating to the company that the culture change was led internally and believed in by all.
Leaders from overseas subsidiaries also joined the event and, to ensure their employees would be engaged too, we equipped them with an “event in a box” that they could take back to their respective teams too.
Looking beyond the launch of the new culture, we set up a support and development programme for cross-functional leaders at the level below the executive team, to equip them with the skills and behaviours to lead the internal changes to ways of working. This resulted in a better understanding of their role in embedding the new culture, their own team dynamics, their impact and influence on others, plus their effectiveness in leading the change.
We implemented our team-based embedding methodology across the business to make sure that everyone fully understood how the new culture applied to each team. The goal here was to empower people to make changes to ways of working within their teams, enabling them to lead the culture shift themselves.
As a result, teams now have a set of methods, tools and measurements to enable them to continually review and refine how they work internally, in collaboration with others in the business, and outwardly with customers and suppliers.
We also continued to provide comms support for Brigade as they embarked on a strategic restructuring of their European sites. This helped leadership demonstrate that the strategic decisions they were making were driven by the company values and focused on enhancing customer experience, improving internal ways of working and boosting employee experiences.