Preparing workers for organisational change: Weetabix Food Company

Operational context

Stuart Branch, executive member for HR, IT and business systems at Weetabix, says organisations should have a constant dialogue with their workers and stakeholders about the changing workplace. “As Amara’s Law says, we constantly overestimate the short-term impact of technology, but we significantly underestimate the long-term impact of technology. And I think that’s very true”.

Weetabix’s ‘Change for Better’ framework

Weetabix’s ‘Change for Better’ framework comprises ten elements, including ‘better data for better decisions’. This is about how it can put data into the hands of the people closest to the work to empower and enable them to make the best decisions for the organisation. Another element is ‘better ways of working’, where the cereal giant talks about continuous improvement. From a strategic point of view, workers are encouraged to challenge the way they work and continuously look at doing things differently. The internal dialogue is that Weetabix has existed for 89 years and wants to exist in 89 years’ time, so it needs ongoing investment in the business.

"We talk about our desire to offset our commodity inflation each year by removing cost. But what we also talk about is that removal of cost is then used to invest in other parts of the business."

Branch says 60% or more of its investment in technology has a direct implication for its people, for example change of role or change in skillset. "So, we have a constant dialogue with our workers around that. Then, when we’re talking to Sam in supply chain about a job they do that robots are going to do in the future, it’s not a surprise because we’re talking about it all the time."

Weetabix places great emphasis on change management. As well as more typical tools, Weetabix uses the following formula to assess whether meaningful change is possible:

D × V × F > R

Here, D stands for dissatisfaction with the current state, V for the vision of the future and F for clarity of first step. These all need to be greater than the resistance (R) to the change.

How was change achieved?

A recent example of technology investment is an accounting system that will take much of the work away from the accounts processing (AP) team. The result is that some tasks become redundant. However, there is almost always an opportunity to redeploy people, says Branch. "What we would say is that you may see yourself as an AP clerk and you may only ever want to be an AP clerk. In which case we can make you redundant and wish you well. But if you like working at Weetabix, we will take a responsible organisation approach and offer training and redeployment."

"We want to provide meaningful work. It means committing to retraining people to give them meaningful employment today."

He adds: "We have been saying for the last eight years that, as the executive team and as the HR team, our job is to be pre-communicating and pre-conditioning unions and workers to this change that’s coming. Specific engagement on particular projects and implementations comes later, but I would expect good HR professionals to be continually doing this pre-conditioning of people and context-setting."