Dulye & Co. Case Study

For full details on this case study, contact Roger Gibboni , Dulye & Co. CFO/Business Manager, (845) 987-7744, rgibboni@dulye.com . Dulye & Co., 52 Kain Road, Warwick, NY 10990, www.dulye.com

Dulye & Co. Client: Thermo Fisher Scientific

Challenge: Improve the organizational impact and return on investment of ThermoFisher Scientific’s Global Town Hall Meetings

Result: Increased Town Hall Meeting effectiveness and employee engagement

Winner: International Association of Business Communicators’ Gold Quill (2010) and Silver Quill Heritage Region (2009)

Client Overview:

Thermo Fisher Scientific is a $10-billion-plus global company with approximately 34,000 employees at over 300 sites around the world. The company chose Dulye & Co. to partner with them to develop and implement a program to create a global Town Hall Meeting program for engaging leaders and employees at all sites. Dulye & Co.’s Spectator-Free Workplace™ solution increased employee involvement through action teams that bridge partnerships between employees and senior leaders, increased content relevancy through simple message tools, and calibrated results and impact through measurement practices.

The Challenge:

Thermo Fisher’s 2007 employee survey results showed that employee satisfaction is highest among employees who:

Consider their direct supervisor or manager to be a role model leader

Clearly understand their annual performance goals and feel that their compensation is aligned with their achievement of those goals and their contributions to the business

Understand the business, their role in the company’s success and the career opportunities available to them.

The company’s small, highly centralized Communications Department gave considerable thought to how it could help the company improve in these areas. How could they reach employees at more than 300 sites in 40 countries with consistent yet localized information? The solution was to focus on connecting with site leaders. If site leaders could be better role model leaders and improve their communications skills, specifically their ability to hold effective Town Hall meetings with solid two-way communications and meaningful content, they would in effect touch all Thermo Fisher employees.

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Helping Thermo Fisher’s site leaders improve their communication skills—which the company had identified as a key competency of Role Model Leaders—and improving the Town Hall meeting process would enable leaders to provide more relevant messaging. We could increase the company’s return on its investment in Town Hall meetings by boosting the effectiveness of these meetings. They would become a true forum for sharing information and promoting two-way communications and boost employees’ understanding of the business and their role in the company’s success.

Goals and Objectives

Help site leaders build their communication skills, and provide them with tools and other resources they can use to improve Town Hall meeting effectiveness.

Change the paradigm of Town Hall meetings as an “event” driven solely by management.

Build better understanding by employees of the business, company objectives and performance and, most importantly, how individuals contribute at their site to the organization’s success.

Our Spectator-Free Workplace ™ Solution

Shared accountability. By transferring ownership for the Town Hall Meeting process from a single function (i.e., Human Resources, Communications Department) to multiple stakeholders, at the senior leader level, employee level, and in various business and functional units. Town Halls became a true team practice.

Baseline measurement. Thermo Fisher’s CEO sent an e-mail to over 140 leaders at major sites around the world explaining why the company was implementing Town Hall process improvements, and asking for their Involvement. The e-mail linked to a survey, designed by Dulye & Co., in which the site leaders could assess current Town Hall practices and suggest improvements.

A new Town Hall Meeting process. Based on the feedback and data collected through our baseline measurement and observation, we developed a revitalized Town Hall meeting process that focused on three key principles:

o Employee Involvemento Local Contento Measurement / Continuous Improvement

Pilot Sites. Thermo Fisher leadership identified two pilot sites to work with Dulye & Co. in developing, testing and refining the new Town Hall process.

Town Hall Resources Web Sites. We worked with the client to establish two new resource sites on the Thermo Fisher intranet:

o One containing information developed by Dulye & Co. on how to recruit members for the Employee Support team, team member roles and responsibilities, sample Town Hall meeting agendas, etc.

o Another for leaders only. It contains links to the archived webcast training as well as the client’s slide library with companywide messaging, including a summary of the company’s quarterly financial report, posted on the day of the quarterly earnings release.

Webcast training sessions for site leaders. Dulye & Co. developed and delivered a two-hour Webcast training session for site leaders. It was offered four times over a five-month period, and about 300 leaders participated. Each session was led jointly by a Thermo Fisher senior leader and a Dulye & Co. consultant.

Teaming with Thermo Fisher’s process improvement community: We also teamed with the client to deliver a special webcast training session, attended by about 100 process improvement managers, to help them understand their role in facilitating the changes, particularly in launching local Employee Support Teams.

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Measurement & Outcomes

As with almost every Dulye & Co. project, feedback and measurement were integral to the implementation of the Thermo Fisher Town Hall improvement process from the beginning, starting with the baseline survey of site leaders and employees at pilot sites to identify key improvement opportunities. And metrics were tied to program objectives; some highlights:

Help site leaders build communication skills, provide them with tools and resources: We surveyed the site leaders at the start of the initiative, and after each of the four webcast training sessions. Some of the results:

o 97 percent of the site leaders surveyed indicated the training would boost their ability to conduct more effective Town Hall meetings, and 93 percent said it contributed to their personal development.

o 96 percent said the course provided practical information and tools that they could use immediately.o Perhaps most telling, 95 percent said they would recommend the training course to other Thermo Fisher

leaders.

Build a partnership between site leadership and employees. Help employees better understand the business, objectives, performance and their role in the organization’s success: We collected baseline data from employees at the two pilot sites at the outset. We then compared this to survey data collected by the Employee Support Teams after the first “improved” Town Hall meetings.

Client Feedback

As site leaders started to launch the new Town Hall process at their respective locations, establishing their Employee Support Teams, focusing on content relevance and two-way communications, and introducing more-disciplined measurement process, our client also started to receive frequent anecdotal feedback:

From Thermo Fisher’s Chief Operating Officer: “I was in Strasbourg (France) today and conducted my first town hall in a site that had implemented your town hall improvement recommendations. Having the town hall committee ask questions really helped spur the dialog. It was one of the better town halls that I have participated in.”

From HR representative in France: “The new Town Hall process is a perfect way to create a positive two-way communication between employees and the site leader … We’ve involved speakers of different departments and not only managers! … The meeting was more lively … Our group set up an e-mail address and question boxes to encourage questions … We are receiving more and more questions … this way of managing meetings has really a positive impact on employees … Furthermore, the feedback form helps us to improve and has already shown us that our work is useful.”

From a site leader in the U.K.: “Without question ... Our best Q&A session.”

From a U.S. location: “I believe [the Employee Support Team] feedback was why our last meeting was so successful … Employees were pleased and stated we were making progress … We were able to give them just- in-time answers to their questions, which also fostered more questions.”

A few months after the initial launch of the new Town Hall process, Dulye & Co. conducted a follow-up assessment with site leaders to measure the progress in implementing the new process and collect data on meeting improvements. Some key findings:

Over 50 percent of the sites had established an Employee Town Hall Support Team, meeting the client’s goal for the first year.

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Over 20 percent of the leaders surveyed said the biggest improvement was in the quality and effectiveness of the Q&A segment of the meeting and the feedback received during the meetings, and another 31 percent said the biggest improvement was in employee engagement and participation

The percentage of sites using a formal feedback / measurement tool at their Town Hall meetings jumped from 9 percent before the improvement program was launched to almost 50 percent.

Perhaps just as telling were some of the comments received from the Thermo Fisher site leaders who responded to the follow-up assessment: “The biggest improvement is in employee involvement and 2 way communication. Employees are also giving positive feedback that these are the best meetings they've seen in years.”

For full details on this case study, contact Roger Gibboni (845) 987-7744.

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