case study | COLLABORATIVE & MATRIXED ORGANISATIONS
flipping the pyramid & building bridges
Logistics prides itself on being reliable, resolute and a stalwart sector. But it faces huge challenges not least in staff shortfalls including a shortage of over 50,000 drivers nationwide. Change is needed, through fresh thinking and active listening to deliver the significant differences necessary for the future.
S
etting the goal of becoming ‘employer of choice’ is a steep ambition in any sector, but in the
logistics industry where the national driver shortage is currently estimated at over 50,000 - ten percent of the workforce - it’s not a ‘nice to do’. It’s vital to ensure you attract and retain the very best people in the industry, which in turn will give you a significant competitive advantage. When I joined Bibby Distribution in 2018, having spent a decade working away
to stay with you and deliver great service, which in turn retains existing customers and attracts new ones. Working with a talented and passionate leadership team - headed by CEO Richard Morson, the company’s former Chief Finance Officer and our first CEO from a non-operational background - we started to map out a people strategy that would make us employer of choice within three years.
ARTICLE BY
DAVE HAWORTH HR DIRECTOR
BIBBY DISTRIBUTION
To say that the logistics industry is vital to everyday life is no
exaggeration and it only
ever comes into the public forum when something goes wrong, as impacts are almost immediate.
Being frank about the challenges the business faced and the mistakes made in the past, helped
break down the ‘us and them’ barriers, and explained we were
drawing a line under the historically siloed mentality and
the ‘command and control’ approach
The first step was to rationalise our traditional pyramid organisation structure and then quite literally flip it on its head. This changed the role of the leadership team from the more traditional ‘command and control’ to that of supporting and enabling the people closest to our customers - they have the best understanding of what’s required and how we can improve. Of course, that’s a lot easier said than done when you have a team of 1,500 employees split across dozens of geographically disparate sites. Our operations were organised into three separate business units based on the types of goods being transported such as; food, packaging, industrial and retail. This often resulted in a silo mentality and a lack of collaboration, even between colleagues working in the same location. Rationalising our structure meant that we unified our business units under a single Operations Director, Dean Jones. His passion for colleagues and customers has driven improved communication, coordination and cooperation between sites - along with regional planning centres and new technology to identify more opportunities for sites to work together, become more efficient and provide an improved customer experience.
from logistics in the consumer Food & Beverage sector, I was confident my ‘outsider’ experience in an industry that was all about service would help bring swift and significant change, by building our people strategy on the ‘service profit chain’ principle. In the simplest terms, if you have skilled and engaged teams, they want
With our business units united, we were ready to begin ‘flipping the pyramid’. This meant fully understanding the challenges that we and our colleagues really faced so we could act. At the same time, we needed to prove to our colleagues we would significantly improve how
40 | thehrdirector | DECEMBER 2019
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