Deliver real business value

An evolutionary journey towards greater Agility and ability to enable business growth through People & Culture

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Erste bank

About the client

The company is one of the leading financial service providers in the Central Eastern Europe region. It was founded more than 200 years ago with the aim of bringing prosperity to the people.

Today, with 7 operating markets, approx. 45,000 employees and more than 16 million customers, the company is committed to making a difference in the financial life of millions of people in the CEE region.

The situation

We are witnessing a disruptive, volatile and dynamic environment. We know that our workforce will be significantly reshaped over the next decade by new generations and perceptions about work, meaning and purpose. Acknowledging that requires reflection on who we are today, what future value we bring and how to act on that.

Our Future Vision initiative is about people, processes, and culture. To have a shared culture, we all needed to work towards the same vision, the same North Star. Irrespective of location or team. Our processes needed to be aligned and simplified, and our priorities needed to be complementary not competing. To work together our priorities and progress needed to be transparent and visible.

The HR group needed to evolve its People & Culture function towards greater agility and ability to enable business growth, more positive employee experiences and deliver higher operational excellence. We needed to re-design our employee journeys to ensure that our employees can work efficiently, contribute, learn and grow and focus more on real value creation.
 
‘One HR’ is our change journey – an evolution of the way we do things (our culture), for our way of working and delivering on things.

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Why client selected Twinxter

When you start a transformation and are looking for external support, you want to look for a party that shares your vision and knows what it means to change the ways of working. For us, Twinxter was this external support with the right mind-set and experience to help us on this transformation journey.

So, when we started the preparation for our transformation, we invited Twinxter without any doubt to be our principal guiding- and sparring partner on the way forward. We were confident that their extensive track record, way of thinking and customer-oriented approach, would be of great value to the success of our transformation.

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Our approach

With the support of Twinxter, we first set up a multidisciplinary transformation team, and developed change and transformation skills and capabilities. Subsequently, we defined our purpose and role in the transformation.

During a strategy session with Twinxter and the leadership team we came to realise that it is not an operating model that delivers value; it is people who deliver value. As the orchestrators of change, we started by helping our leaders gain an understanding of what the organisation’s direction should be, how to align on that new direction company-wide, and what their role as a leadership team should be during the transformation and beyond.

So, we first started to work on the way we lead the change, support and empower people. We felt that otherwise our desired added value, ROI and impact will not be satisfactory, and the transformation will be doomed to fail. Involving our people / teams in shaping the future proofed to be key. Shaping a future vision while co-creating with the people of the organisation is much more powerful, and results in higher commitment levels.

After these initial phases we took multiple steps of which a few are highlighted below:

  1. Starting with the now enabled us to really understand what worked and what needed to be improved. 
  2. We imagined our future to create a common ground of our future aspirations and discover the WHY of our leadership team and department.
  3. We build our story to designing a compelling story and align our perspectives on how the world will be different for our customers when we reach our vision.
  4. Designing of personas helped us define our future character helped to visualise our vision and made it tangible.
  5. We adopted the Obeya approach to visualise and link our purpose and strategic pillars with execution.
  6. Co-create the future and leverage the intelligence of our employees as we believe in their ideas, experiences, creativity and positive intent.

The Results

  • Creation of a common ground and starting point – The creation of a clear GAP analysis helped leaders and teams realise that we share similar problems, and that we have a diverse set of strengths that we can leverage and use to help each other.

  • Established a clear and connected purpose, vision, mission, and values and principles which resulted in better alignment of global and local strategies to that purpose (committed and united team).

  • Design of a compelling change story – Building our unique story created an emotional connection to the change journey and, for the first time, made everyone think about the steps behind it and what it really takes to carry out such a journey.

  • Successful Implementation of Obeya – We adopted the Obeya approach so we can visualise and align our purpose and strategic pillars, to discuss our priorities, and to collaborate on their delivery. This facilitated enhanced decision making, and improved collaboration.

  • Formation of a capable Transformation Team to accelerate, balance and orchestrate the change journey. With the help of Twinxter, we set up a multidisciplinary transformation team, and developed change and transformation skills and capabilities ourselves first.

  • Increased employee engagement – Shaping a future vision, while co-creating with all the people in the organisation, for instance via the introduction of co-creating methods, tools, and activities in the Employee Journey, proved to be very powerful and resulted in high commitment levels.

  • Visualisation of the HR function – With the help of personas, including our preferences, motivations, beliefs, values and principles, and frustrations, we made visible how we how we would like to be perceived in the future – what we are good at and what we bring to the table.

  • People became ambassadors – As we co-created all the elements with our employees from start, they got inspired and fully engaged. By involving them straight away, they now carry the purpose and their commitment to change in their hearts and minds. 

  • Establishing a transparent Leadership System –While working with a visual management system like the Obeya and OKRs.

  • Strong Leadership Team –This helps our leaders tremendously when it comes to being able to stand strong and united, to make decisions together, to be committed and confident that whatever comes, we will manage.

  • Creating an interactive working rhythm – With amongst others, Quarterly Business Reviews to celebrate successes and learn from experiments, which accelerated continuous learning and improvement.

For more details on our approach, implemented changes and results, please feel free to download the full case study.

Adriano Bruno

Adriano Bruno

Chief Human Resource Officer, Erste Group Bank

Twinxter and our transformation team, designed our Agile change, our change journey, and build a strong, purpose-led leadership team. Followed by deciding what the best operating model would be and how we can align on strategic priorities. Alize and Twinxter were essential to the success of our transformation. Their expertise, open and seamless collaborative style always struck a great balance between adjusting to our needs and pushing us to remain on the right path. I can gladly recommend working with Alize and Twinxter’s team, and would call on her expertise any time such a transformation is required.