The Role of Culture in Turnaround and Transformation

On 27th March, Clarity hosted our latest CPO event and we were delighted to be joined by Michelle Parczuk, CPO at Avon as our guest speaker. Michelle shared her experience of leading an international turnaround, which involved radically simplifying the organisation, delayering and reducing total headcount by 30%. She explained how Avon was able to maintain a strong and focused organisation and an engaged workforce, at the same time as budgets were tightened and teams reduced.

Areas covered included the importance of defining Avon’s EVP, keeping true to the company purpose, dialling up investment in people and leadership development and building psychological safety to drive an inclusive culture.

Michelle’s story resonated with participants who had been through or were at various stages of their own transformation journey. Experiences were shared and points of discussion included:

• Shifting mindsets – whether related to a shift in channel focus or the promotion of less traditional career paths; sharing success stories, in particular leveraging the leaders in the organisation who are fully embracing the changes, is often the most powerful tool to build belief

• Being explicit and transparent when difficult decisions are made builds understanding and protects the business in the longer-term

• Reiterating the company’s values at every stage of the transformation and keeping the purpose at the heart of decisions maintains the culture

• Building an emotional connection to the brand keeps people engaged and improves retention, even when financial rewards are having to be squeezed. In a
general climate of lower remuneration, you still need to make exceptions and properly reward your high performers

• Strong and simplified KPIs keep people focused on what really matters. Linking HR teams’ KPIs to commercial goals helps to balance ‘the hard and the soft’ and maintain a performance edge, while continuing to gain buy-in for the change

• Taking bigger bets on people - accelerating progression for high potential talent and encouraging breadth in careers

• Reskilling and knowing when to be bolder in bringing in external talent to plug critical gaps

• Ensuring that the HR team is partnering with the marketing team to improve internal communications and to tie in the EVP to the company’s purpose

• Opportunities to exploit technology for transactional tasks allow people to become even stronger at the parts of their role that add the most value We would like to thank Michelle for sharing her insights and the retail and consumer HR leaders that joined us and contributed to a lively and thought provoking conversation.