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Engaging employees
The pharmaceutical industry is moving at an unprecedented pace. The market is constantly shifting, different stakeholders are coming to the table, the way we do business and the way we need to structure our company is constantly changing. To maintain success the industry must continuously adapt and keep pace. The key to the future lies with your employees. If they are engaged, your company wins. You must learn from the past, involve employees in decisions and create a strong, common vision of your company's future.
Shared vision
Every year the industry faces additional challenges often leading to companies reviewing their marketing approach and the roles and involvement of different departments.
With many blockbuster patents running out in the next 5–7 years, most big pharmaceutical companies are focusing on R&D and are increasing co-operation with smaller, innovative biotech companies. Roche has announced plans to outsource large amounts of its R&D efforts to small biotech.
Merck recently took a fresh approach to the launch of Januvia, recognising that its R&D was nearly five years behind its major competitor. The company restructured, creating a high-performance organisation with one main focus – to get its internal R&D, manufacturing, marketing and commercial teams working together to launch Januvia shortly after the competitor product. With a shared vision the team worked together to understand each other's challenges and identify ways it could shave years off its traditional drug development timeline. The company exceeded its expectations by launching ahead of its competitors and got the product on the market almost immediately after FDA approval. In addition its intense pre-marketing campaign lead to the product being a success.
Present tense
Creating efficient teams, tearing down silos, securing high levels of co-operation and creating new working procedures seem easy on the drawing boards of CEOs. Making it work in real life is significantly harder. One of the biggest challenges in big change initiatives is achieving a common understanding of the present situation. Often CEOs have talked of a beautiful vision in front of a big crowd of employees who are all more concerned about the present.
When the insulin giant Novo Nordisk wanted to launch new co-operative working procedures, they started the process with a very detailed analysis of one of their most successful development projects, Novoseven. The company interviewed everybody in the project and collated all learnings in a report. Those behind the research then toured the company to share the information. Through cross-functional groups and high levels of involvement, new working procedures, and new friendships and networks across different functions, were developed.
Getting everybody together – at least virtually – to gain a common understanding of the present situation and challenges facing the company is important. Gaining an outside perspective is often good for calibrating understanding.
When Pfizer's Danish organisation had to focus on a new future after several reorganisations and layoffs, all employees gathered for a two-day seminar where they were presented with the status of the company and heard the views of major players from government, retailers and competitors. After that, the employees worked in cross-functional teams to find new, smarter ways to work together.
Getting everybody in the same room may prove difficult, but there are other solutions. When Coca-Cola wanted to create a new vision, they arranged for a big 'Blog blast' where all employees could comment and have their say on various topics online. The project was a huge success and managed to reach employees in factories and warehouses who are normally not very involved in overall company business.
Touch the future
Once everybody is on the same page, you are ready to conquer the future, but you need to know what it looks like. Visions created together with employees are more likely to become reality. A strong vision is simple yet daunting – Kennedy's dream of placing a man on the moon – it creates images in the minds of employees that motivate them to act. Every year I see hundreds of mission statements that have been invented by executive boards and communicated in a pamphlet which is archived by the employees five minutes after they receive it. For a vision to work, employees need to be involved in defining what it means and what it requires of them and their departments. It becomes part of all decisions and a key element of the company strategy – part of the organisation's DNA. The core idea should be presented in many formats so that you can virtually touch it and smell it within the company on a day-to-day basis.
It is not hard to make everybody look in the same direction but it is difficult to make sure they all see the same thing.
Co-operating in change
Working together to define new ways of co-operating at all levels is essential to change behaviour across the organisation. When it comes to enhancing co-operation, pharma should look to the frontrunners of globalisation, such as IT and logistics companies. Here the immense pressure for worldwide solutions has spurred new working methods and a global mindset. Pharma has the same challenges now that the IT and the logistics industries had five years ago. The business and talent is dispersed around the globe.
Management needs to consider four equally important elements: motivation, information, leadership and skills.
Involvement is the key to motivation. If employees find their own solutions to problems they will also be committed to make them work. Even if you are in a hurry, it is worthwhile to invest time in this part of the process. The project may start up slowly – but will gain momentum later.
There are many ways to involve employees. Burson-Marsteller has invented a methodology called 'speed involvement' where we break the different challenges into smaller pieces and ask employees to come up with solutions – or prioritise pre-chosen solutions – in short bursts of a few minutes, either online or at places such as canteens or hallways where employees pass by.
Managers also need to be involved and committed and dedicate the necessary time to listen to employees' input. Bring people together in a room and have them develop the plans based on your overall target. Let managers meet to brainstorm new ways of working and get to know each other informally too at social events.
The second factor is information. Research suggests that you have to communicate important information seven times through at least three media or channels to reach all employees in a large organisation. At the same time, you need to reduce the number of overall corporate messages for employees to no more than five.
Perception of leadership
Creating an open and collaborative environment starts from the top and has to be driven by the company's managers and supervisors. Most employees will look to see if their managers are 'walking the talk' to judge if the company really means business.
Managers are normally characterised as prioritising results. If their worth is still measured by their own departments' business output, then this will be their only focus – what gets measured gets done. Incentive schemes must support the change effort.
During their big turnaround in the nineties, Japanese pharmaceutical company ESAI selected and trained 103 change managers who spurred local activities by finding or inventing new ideas to realign the business, increase innovation and diminish costs. Together with the employees, the change managers came up with hundreds of ideas that involved the actions of more than 900 of the company's 4,000 employees. In all 73 projects were implemented resulting in a great leap forward for the company.
A big change effort inevitably involves new working procedures and perhaps reorganisation of the company as a whole. Most managers will be surprised how important the small, symbolic things in everyday work life are to employees, such as: who gets promoted; what their boss is doing differently since the new project started; and who is getting appraisal from senior managers. These are more visible to employees than the large, centralised business decisions. If a company wants to promote transparency and co-operation in the business, local managers must start by involving employees in the smaller everyday decisions and by encouraging better relationships with other departments. If the company wants people to focus on expenditure, managers should give up expensive company cars and stop travelling firstclass.
Providing sufficient training shows that the company is willing to invest in its people. It ensures that employees are comfortable with initiatives and have the skills that empower them to act.
Many managers would argue that new fast-moving pharmaceutical development programmes are about coordinating business processes on a high level – but it is employees, in the laboratories and factories, that make it happen. A recent study indicated that companies with a majority of engaged employees have 38 per cent higher customer satisfaction, 22 per cent higher productivity and 27 per cent higher profits than companies with a majority of disengaged employees. Feel free to calculate the ROI for your company.
The Authors
Bo Øksnebjerg is director, European change and organisational performance practice and Karen Winterhalter is managing director, EMEA healthcare practice at Burson-Marsteller
To comment on this article, email pme@pmlive.com
