Boehringer Ingelheim

The challenge

Boehringer Ingelheim CHC Division called upon the services of Ashtead Performance Group, a consultancy focusing on company cultures, leadership development plus coaching and development of high performance teams to help them with their workplace culture.

There was a ‘feeling’ within the division that their structure was too hierarchical.

Too many employees were feeling frustrated that they had to refer to senior management to gain authorisation and couldn’t via their own means make things happen.

The company wanted to create a ‘Winning Culture’, and knew that changes had to be made to empower employees to become much more entrepreneurial in their attitudes and behaviour.

What did we do?

Ashtead Performance Group employed us to create a pulse survey to get to the heart of the empowerment issues at the multinational.

Before we created the pulse survey we discussed the project in detail with Ashtead to  get to grips with the issues being faced by the organisation.

Our senior researchers developed a bespoke questionnaire to test levels of empowerment within the organisation across all sites around the globe.

Results

The results supported the senior management team’s belief that empowerment levels could be raised across all sites.

It also pinpointed territories where employee empowerment was particularly low.

The pulse survey gave the management team and Ashtead  the hard facts. It was clear that change needed to take place to empower employees to be a part of the new winning culture.

Action

Once the senior management team had seen the results they decided to create a steering committee to undertake cultural change in the workplace.

Boehringer Ingelheim is now in its third year of developing its winning culture, which was kick-started by the pulse survey’s results.

The future…

Since the survey, and resulting management action, Boehringer Ingelheim has enjoyed uplift in its productivity and profits.  The management team hopes to undertake a further pulse survey to ensure empowerment levels across the company are as high as they are perceived to be.

“The Survey Initiative has been terrific throughout the whole process and has really gone the extra mile. Their reporting is second to none and it needed to be as the pharmaceutical industry employs very analytical minds. Thanks to their pulse survey we had the data to ensure we could undertake the next step of our cultural change programme. I would recommend The Survey Initiative to other HR consultancies”

Simon Alldridge, MD, Ashtead Performance Group