Putting humans at the center also shaped the approach to listening, communicating and helping to deliver the transformation.
“Our customers and co-workers have been at the heart, throughout the entire transformation,” said one Market Support Manager at the Ingka Group.
For example, to thrive in the new environment and set IKEA’s customer support transformation up for success, it was crucial to gain a deep understanding of the needs of all stakeholders, including the transformation team, co-workers and customers. The leadership team had to focus on finding ways to sustain the energy of their stakeholders, listen to their teams and educate, engage, and equip everyone involved with the right tools to make the transformation successful.
To build better communication throughout the transformation, the team established a recurring event called Retro Week every four months. This week-long event served as a pause from the transformation, allowing teams to reflect on what had been achieved and how they had worked together. During Retro Weeks, the teams focused on creating and refining long- and mid-term plans, while also taking time to learn and grow together. This included inviting guest speakers for inspiration and learning, setting up lessons-learned sessions, and emphasizing the importance of health and wellbeing.
Overall, the transformation team created an environment of psychological safety where open feedback, including disagreement, was encouraged, heard and managed respectfully.
The transformation also put a strong emphasis on gathering insights from co-workers. To achieve this, internal surveys were conducted three times a year, asking specific questions related to the transformational topics such as the quality of deployed products, efficiency of work processes, and the co-worker experience of being impacted by the work completed through the transformation.
These insights provided opportunities for the team to more rapidly course-correct elements of the transformation. For example, there was direct feedback from some co-workers that a new system had overloaded the underlying technology stack, meaning that it took far too long for them to login at the start of a shift. This gave the prompt to IT teams to address the issue immediately and was a learning for the wider transformation to incorporate.
By listening to its employees and taking their feedback seriously, the transformation demonstrated a commitment to creating a change that was grounded in the needs of its co-workers supporting the customers every day.