How to manage and prioritize change management projects in a CAC 40 company

The challenge: initiate corporate transformation to adopt a CSR initiative on the long term

Farah Harriche is Director of Transformation at Saint-Gobain, in the Building Distribution department for the French market. As such, two years ago, Farah and her team launched a transformation program for the company’s strategy with a focus on CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility). As she herself points out, about this program: "It was a strategic challenge and a priority to engage teams and partners."

To inspire this transformation, which could prove onerous for a company like Saint-Gobain, she relied on the help of numerous collaborators: "We sent about 200 of them to different companies, so that they could have learning expeditions (or “ethnos”) based on 4 topics."

The purpose of these learning expeditions was to bring back information and good practices established in other organizations and use this to help the Saint-Gobain teams. Based on visits and conferences, the goal was clear to Farah: "imagining what the company will be like in 2030."

Once these learning expeditions had been completed, Farah organized a large seminar to determine with stakeholders the priority projects to create a roadmap to be followed to achieve the CSR goals by 2030. Faced with a large amount of information, she decided to turn to Klaxoon tools to organize her seminar as effectively as possible.

The solution: simple questions, clear answers and facilitated decision-making with the Question tool

On the day of the seminar, no less than 40 people from the management committee and the CSR committee came together with one objective: define the projects and create a clear roadmap to achieve the goals set by the 2030 vision.

Ahead of the seminar, Farah and her teams listed 30 transformation projects. But as Farah herself says: "30 projects was a lot, and we needed to prioritize some of them." This prioritization stage was crucial to move from ideas to action. These priorities then determined the order of actions and responsibilities. And to best accomplish this, Farah decided to use Klaxoon’s Board.

Before the seminar, Farah reorganized the projects asynchronously, according to the 3 CSR pillars. She listed them on the Board, so they could all be seen by the decision-making committee on the day of the seminar. 

Then, to assess the criticality of each project, she developed a comprehensive rating grid: "Each project had 3 decision criteria: the societal and environmental impact, the criticality from a business perspective, and the ease of implementation."

To assess the importance of these 3 criteria, Farah used Klaxoon’s Question tool. She created one Rating Question for each criterion, using the 5-star rating system provided by the tool. On the day of the seminar, the participants were invited to express their opinion about the project by assessing each criterion. All they had to do was rate them from 1 to 5 stars.

These 3 clicks, repeated for the 30 projects, made prioritization a breeze. Farah tells us about her method:

We get the average stars for each suggestion, and then we can see which ones stand out. It's all very collaborative.

To be sure she gets the committee’s approval, Farah returned to the Board, and asked the representatives to choose the 15 projects that were a priority for them. The participants were then invited to like the 15 projects they think are most critical. The most popular ones immediately became the priorities.

This way, in just 45 minutes, Farah has got a consensus from the management and CSR committee, to assess and prioritize 15 projects out of the 30 presented.

The result: faster decision-making and actions ready to be initiated within an hour

For Farah, the benefits of using Klaxoon tools are significant.

First, ahead of the seminar, in terms of preparation and goals definition, Farah is very satisfied: "The first benefit is the speed of preparation and creation. It took me barely 20 minutes to create my Board with the different Questions. With Klaxoon, we have meetings that are much better prepared, with a real purpose."

As for the caliber of discussions, Farah thinks that "the meetings were not necessarily effective before, and not everyone had the opportunity to express themselves. Here, we had multiple participants with 40 people and, in record time, they were all able to assess and prioritize the projects." 

With the Question tool, all the participants have the opportunity to give their point of view on each project. The result: a 100% participation, and accurate information to determine the top-priority projects.

All the results are visible on the Board, which makes for fact-based discussions. Having the facts helps to better understand the issues and make the right decisions. As a bonus, this makes it possible to identify priority projects at a glance.

And at the end of the seminar, the effects were almost immediate, according to Farah: "We made appropriate collective decisions and we could implement action plans much more easily and quickly, thanks to the platform that encapsulates all the information from the meeting." All the assessments, information and ideas stay on the Board at the end of the seminar, so all the stakeholders can and consult it and retrieve information.

To conclude, Farah recalls a similar seminar held without Klaxoon a few years ago: "We held the same session with a few more projects. Back then, we spent a day deliberating, not counting the time spent preparing a report. Today, in one hour, we have everything we need with a report. We’ve gone from 1 day without counting the report to a 1-hour seminar with a pre-prepared report."

For Farah, the benefits of Klaxoon can be summed up in one sentence: