Renovating on strong roots

A new approach to personnel and organization management to enable change.

We have talked about this with Sara Scapinello, Training, Development, and Internal Communication Manager at Lavazza

by Roberto Monti, Sales Manager and Partner VisionMind

The interview with Sara Scapinello was published in the December 2017 issue no. 183 of the quarterly AIDP Direzione del Personale (page 44). The editorial board of DdP has kindly granted reproduction rights.

The article

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Sara Scapinello makes it clear:

I’m living an intense experience. I use these words because they combine the long-standing experience with what Lavazza offers our consumers, a simple, daily gesture that promotes social relations, energy, vitality. I use these words to summarize the change we are going through in the company, a renovation based on strong roots.

We have no difficulty believing her, as Lavazza's recent change is really tangible, starting from the new headquarters in Turin, a multifunctional site that includes offices, a park, a restaurant, and an auditorium: an organizational change above all. Sara Scapinello, a Degree in Literature, solid background as a consultant with key multinational companies, has been in charge of training, development, and internal communication at Lavazza for over three years, and is now helping Lavazza employees find the tools to take that leap in terms of personal and professional maturity the company and the market are asking them.

We have asked her what it means to put into play over 120 years of history, success, organizational and personal patterns that have contributed to making Lavazza the go-to brand in the coffee industry we all know well.

To me, joining the company was a discovery: put into play 120 years of history means understanding it in its essence and values, to begin with. Listening is paramount: you just need to get in the building and see Caballero and Carmencita, who recall all the icons in the history of communication; as all companies, some spaces and rituals help understand far better than any presentation the organizational model and processes. To me, challenging all this means understanding the company's historical essence, valuing the extraordinary potential of passion and entrepreneurial vision. Spaces and habits are catalysts of change and potent activators of energy and synergy. We have played on these two elements by breaking some old established patterns and creating new paradigms.

What were the major organizational impacts, and how did you handle them?

We didn’t really change the organizational model in its structure. Our commercial vocation has been the real driver: the company reinforced its ability to look at international markets by structuring investments and competencies alongside with the business needs in acquisition operations to expand our presence on the market, restructuring product development and innovation plans within the R&D function, always with a strong focus on coffee.

The real impacts we had to handle were: agility, speed, and openness to change. As necessary elements for the company's growth, they took us to change our way of working through a series of operational tools: the creation of inter-functional teams for product development, a performance management system focused on the improvement of the organization and competencies, inspiration from open-innovation models to elaborate new experiences for consumers, strengthening relations with subsidiaries by creating communities and open dialogue on local markets' needs. On top of all of this, we recruited new professionals and created a mix of cultures and approaches that we are now trying to bring together in one unique model to represent us.

What is the role of the new headquarters in this?

Nuvola, designed by architect Cino Zucchi, is our new headquarters that will take Lavazza through the next 120 years. The facility collects and activates the current transformation: it's the concrete expression of the openness and projection towards the outside while maintaining the connection with our territory. The new site combines spaces that change to accommodate the needs of those who work at the company, those who collaborate with us, or even those who visit us out of curiosity. The whole package: a venue for events, an experiential museum designed by RAA (the same architect who designed the Lego and IKEA museums), two restaurants that are open to the public, a store, the Design and Applied Art University (IAAD), a park open to the public. A massive project to be inaugurated in 2018. For Lavazza collaborators, a sinuous and modern building by Architect Cino Zucchi, designed and built according to US sustainability standards (LEED).

It’s an opportunity for a shared and open space, with areas for collaboration, creativity and relaxation (gym and social room), and coffee experiences in a corporate café on a green terrace.

Nuvola has let us take a significant step forward in remote working, sustainable mobility (by encouraging public transport and corporate carpooling), welfare, and wellness with an internal gym. Lastly, a considerable technological evolution: the whole building has domotic and touch technologies and dedicated Apps for communication and advanced interaction.

There is another relevant aspect: this project has allowed us to set up new modalities and communication channels with employees. Involvement and sharing have been essential leverages. We have achieved them through space co-designing sessions, an ambassador group to help us share information widely and welcome colleagues, and observing the adoption of behaviors through focus group activities at every level of the organization.

We have exploited this situation to share social media tools by activating brand new content access modalities, information, and feedback. This has been the real paradigm shift. Openness, participation, sharing, capitalizing on other organizations’ experiences before us, and adopting new practices.

In the past few years, Lavazza has boosted its internationalization process. What have been the main aspects affecting your functions, and what the responses?

The HR function has faced pretty serious challenges. Opening new markets, together with new acquisitions of foreign brands (French, Danish, and Canadian) has brought a massive managerial effort in terms of talent onboarding and integrating new coworkers from other multinational realities with different cultures.

The real HR challenge is to be the carrier of the distinctiveness and uniqueness of the whole organization.

Even in this case, I firmly believe that HR ensured the protection of the organization’s structural aspects (everything has been managed on schedule with no business disruption). Despite the positive outcome, there is still room for improvement in defining culture and shared values, not necessarily in terms of business but more in terms of creating a community where everybody can feel they belong.

When betting on internationalization, you unleash significant transformation projects of operating models, processes, benchmark-supported tools to face the competition and the market. This is necessary, but the real HR challenge is to be the carrier of the whole organization's distinctiveness and uniquenessstrong>, especially when the company has had a long-standing history of passion, entrepreneurship, and sustainability.

If this uniqueness becomes a real opportunity for people to bring about change and live an engaging work experience, it’ll be easier to attract talent even abroad.

Our brand's uniqueness and its strong Italian connotation attributed by our customers must be firmly communicated even internally. Basically, the values and culture of the organization are what the challenges are about today.

How are leadership behaviors changing, and how are they going to change within Lavazza?

The new headquarters is a paradigm shift for everyone, and it reflects the transformation of the whole company: openness to the outside world means transparency, confrontation, ability to solve conflicts to progress; living in a place where you can meet partners, visitors, and clients seamlessly means representing Lavazza at any moment and really being ambassadors of an extraordinary, world-renowned brand. The combination of work and socializing/wellness spaces implies the management's ability to ease the hierarchical and control mechanisms to give room to participating and inclusive moments in which "putting yourself out there" has a strong emotional connotation. The office layout leads people to feel less tethered to a structure and live the spaces and the time spent at the office, depending on the occasion and the relationships they establish.

This is in line with what new generations ask out of corporations, as they seek the ideal company and aim at an unusual leadership model for management to inspire by combining mind, heart, and guts.

Even the commercial strategy and the market approach have changed dramatically. How did you help people interpret changes, make them their own, and develop new and more consistent behaviors?

We're just at the beginning: there are still many steps ahead, and we need to follow a roadmap we are designing day by day with management.
We are working on many fronts: let me give you an example.

Last year, we launched the Insieme per Crescere project (Together for Growth) to reconfigure a part of the sales force on a new operating model.

Even in this case, the program is very complex: it implies integrating two different sales forces, reconfiguring commercial areas, direct and indirect management models, a new selling story to bring onto the market, all this while making up for effectiveness and efficiency.

We started from the people by promoting a highly articulated assessment path that used different methodologies: online testing, assessment centers, job shadowing. But this is not the point. We wanted to activate people first: taking a snapshot of the sales network was an excellent chance to gain awareness and send out the message that improving competencies goes for everybody.

We have gathered the data for immediate feedback (we're talking over 250 people) with the consultants' support who guided us through this. This has led to some tangible results: people who didn't initially join the path (external personnel whose participation in assessment initiatives were not mandatory) were asked to participate. On-the-field activities were particularly fruitful: our people appreciated having a moment to share with someone who speaks their language and knows their job. This approach has made the program and the team working on it more credible, and it also allowed us to provide management with useful feedback to improve processes and communication with the network. Basically, Insieme per Crescere really comes off as a process/approach rather than a training program.

Now we are starting phase two, and thanks to the data we've gathered, we can better break down the population and invest in tailormade initiatives.

A really articulated and innovative path. How did you get people’s support?

Broad vision and planning of the Lavazza family are a naturally engaging element. I need to point out that Lavazza has all the conditions and potential to generate real traction.

In this context, I believe that people who, like me, promote transformation have a facilitator's role.

You get full support if you depict an engaging path everyone can take: in a context of personnel/competencies/culture turnover, leaving no one behind is something you need to evaluate carefully. And when you decide to take this path, you need to invest personally in communication and expectation management with great patience and consistency.

To me, you get support with authenticity by making information and tools and - possibly - decision-making accessible to people, clarifying how much room every one of us has to affect change.

Considering your past work experiences, how can training contribute to such important and articulated change processes? And what support can communication leverages give?

Allow me to rephrase: we don’t manage training and communication, but we support people with change. This perspective helps structure problems and responses. The essential contribution is to understand expectations and impacts. There are two tools I have always used in all of my projects: stakeholder analysis (with their expectations and resistances) and impact mapping.

Regardless of the entity that drives transformation, if the HR function manages to build a path that answers these two elements (impacts and expectations), then the value is instantly recognizable, whether the path is a training, communication, or support activity.

What advice would you ultimately give your colleagues in other organizations who are called to manage organizational changes?

I learned that managing change is not something you delegate or improvise: we ask those who have the expertise, the methods, and the approach, but then the content and the rules of engagement need to be designed by those who operate within the HR function with integrity and consistency.