BUSINESS EXPERTISE
Governance & Structure
How we support our clients
Kéa has a strong expertise in topics related to organizational change, which represents almost 30% of its turnover. Managed with care, structural change is a powerful transformation lever that can enable a company to make radical progress in meeting its strategic and efficiency challenges. Upstream, the goal is to define and implement the best objective while ensuring full business continuity and maintaining employee commitment. Once implemented, the challenge is to maximize the potential of the new organization by using complementary levers and applying the logic that drove the structural change to all management processes and tools. In this way, structural changes are no longer perceived by teams as traumatic, but as a natural evolution in which the goal is to move forward and stay on course.
It is with this logic that we help our clients to define and then exploit the full potential of their structure by giving meaning to the organization, by complementing the structural change with alternative coordination levers, by empowering managers and employees, and by managing the impact of the structure through the various dimensions of the operating model (adapting governance, simplifying processes, changing behaviors).
Moreover, we are absolutely convinced that the structure is one of the first levers of transformation of the leader: it is a place of integration of capital, governance and managerial energy. Questions of organizational development are the prerogative of the leader, with a field that he cannot delegate or even share, and on which he must take a step back: the WHAT. It is also a collective work on the WHY and the HOW to ensure a sociodynamic transformation.
Will the central functions simply act as a financial holding company, setting financial, M&A and investment targets? ? A role of strategic architect by also taking charge of strategic planning, defining business lines and getting involved in the career management of senior executives? Or even a controller role, sharing / pooling systems related to operational activities and becoming more involved in the strategic and financial issues of the entities? Or an operational role, taking on the role of planning and resource allocation, being actively involved in the operational management of the business and creating shared services? We help our clients to answer this question according to their challenges and their existing situation, by mobilizing our proven know-how in organizational design of "custom made" central functions and our benchmarks function by function in terms of sizing, costs and activities & processes.
4 possible roles for central functions, with a cursor to be positioned between countries / professions / headquarters
Our know how
CENTRAL FUNCTIONS
Defining the fair value of a central function
and its positioning
The business world has evolved tremendously over the last thirty years. What made the competitive advantage of structures, namely a force of cohesion, arbitration and integration of decisions, has been severely challenged. There is an urgent need to transform the structure into a frame of reference that integrates three fundamental dimensions: capital, governance and managerial energy.
Kéa has developed a methodology that allows us to rethink and create a new organizational structure in a very short time, based on our strengths: business sense, the role of the human being and pragmatism.
In addition, these organizational issues have always been a field of development for our innovation, which materializes in particular through publications and conferences that are constantly confronted with the reality of the business world.
The business world is changing rapidly, and some companies that were previously in a situation of growth and geographical expansion are now in a situation of repositioning their activities. In this context, their matrix organization, based on coordination to the detriment of cooperation and autonomy, hinders economic development by inhibiting responsiveness and creating inertia in an environment where the market is changing at an unprecedented rate. The use of support functions has made decision-making circuits more complex and reinforced centralization, with production and commercial teams executing directives from above.
Improve the performance of the organization while seeking new opportunities
POST MATRIX
Move towards more frugal organizations ?
Our transformation projects & reorganization of central functions
Transforming the central functions of an actor from B to B distribution
Kéa supported the review of the central functions (Purchasing, Marketing, HR, Finance, IS, Supply Chain) to identify the impact of the strategic plan and potential barriers to its implementation, and to determine the potential for optimizing resources to be reallocated to meet the needs of the target. We relied on our external insights (benchmark) and strong team involvement to drive alignment and ownership.
Simplifying corporate functions for a global food company
Kéa has defined, managed and piloted a process of simplification and efficiency based on 4 components: clarifying the raison d'être, optimizing the organization by clarifying responsibilities, reviewing governance and processes, capitalizing on human levers (management practices, objectification, management of expertise). This work enabled the teams to take nearly 320 actions in one year.
Our post-matrix organization projects
We help our clients to redefine and implement their organization around 4 main objectives :
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Optimize the level of internal service at its fair value: redefining the mission of each function, defining the right mix - control, reporting, coordination, autonomy -, operating methods structured around the needs of the internal customer.
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Improve productivity while optimizing costs: transversality and elimination of unnecessary interfaces, elimination of duplication and repositioning of support functions to add value.
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Develop responsiveness and flexibility: rapid decision-making, clear and explicit responsibilities - functions, subsidiaries, categories, markets -, streamlining of management and coordination systems.
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Establish an agile culture and working methods: innovation & agility, management that encourages initiative and autonomy.
Our approach combines tools and modes of animation to create, from the outset, the collective support and conditions for the success of new organizations. Our tools make it possible to take a global and calm view of the subjects to be taught (including social relations) and to arrive, in co-construction, at an organizational goal that maximizes the global value for the company: value for the shareholder, the customer, the employee.
Faced with an increasingly unpredictable environment, it is imperative that leaders devote energy to working on the resilience of their organizations. Resilience is one of the key intangibles that will play a critical role in tomorrow's world. This world of tomorrow, which can be glimpsed with the Covid-19 crisis, is already becoming a tangible reality.
Crisis mode is not sustainable over time, especially since it tends to exhaust the organization. Since any system is not very comfortable with prolonged disequilibrium, there is a natural tendency for a company to want to find a balance that is not necessarily the one it had before the crisis. It is the resilience that is activated and facilitates the construction of a new equilibrium.
Business Resilience: A complete package!
RESILIENCE
Cultivating resilience as a critical asset in tomorrow's world
Central/local restructuring of a global luxury group
Kea supported the implementation of a central/local reorganization plan through the review of BUs and regional units upstream (clarification of purpose and strategic vision, rejection of new detailed structural plans) and downstream (implementation of social dialog and change support processes).
Transforming a specialized brand to operate
By simplifying the organization and the management model, modernizing the management processes and tools, and mobilizing the entire organization, Kéa supported the transformation of the operating model. The clarification of the vision and the challenges of each department, the cultural diagnosis and the activation of the management line were key to accelerate and maximize the appropriation of the teams.
Our employee empowerment projects
Is it possible to create a "win-win" approach based on trust and autonomy by rethinking the way the company operates and developing new management attitudes?
We bet on it. The bet that an organization - in the broad sense of structure, responsibilities, governance and culture - based on trust and accountability will ultimately unleash business performance. To this end, we support our clients' empowerment transformation programs by working around 4 axes: local, interconnected experiments (cf. small autonomous islands), creating the conditions for managerial autonomy (transparency of information between teams, accountability for results, trust and cooperation), management transformation and the necessary organizational changes, which must come as a consequence of team empowerment and not as a prerequisite.
Reorganization to promote the responsibility of teams for a French manufacturer
Kea helped reorganize this client by following strong strategic axes, including empowering teams. We helped them to define the reason for the approach, what accountability is and how to implement it.
Developing the autonomy of managing directors of subsidiaries of a Transportation and Logistics Company
Kea helped develop the autonomy of the subsidiary managers and reposition the added value of the supporting functions (HR, Management Control, Quality, Operations, Sales). After a diagnosis of the interactions, we adjusted the levers in their hands (e.g. recruitment), facilitated certain processes (e.g. budget) and designed a new management model promoting autonomy and cooperation.
Companies are facing profound changes (digitalization, internationalization, new forms of competition, regulations, etc.), the scale and speed of which are unprecedented. At the same time, employees' expectations have evolved, their relationship with work has changed, their attachment to the organization has changed. The very concept of business is being redefined. More than ever, this is challenging the way companies work and manage, which is often ill-suited to these new challenges. In this complex and unpredictable context, which requires anticipation, agility, contribution and vigilance from everyone, employee autonomy is no longer an option. Because it is from this autonomy that the market is born, the good dynamics of the company that will serve as an engine to fly away.
If the autonomy and initiative of employees are an objective, the empowerment of organizations is a necessity.
EMPOWERMENT
Restore autonomy and confidence to better understand business changes and employee expectations
Our projects to boost resilience capacity
We support leaders in developing their organization's resilience capacity by working on the 3 dimensions of resilience: organizational resilience (ecosystem and supply chain survival, business model, skills and talents, etc.), collective resilience (ways of working, behaviors, corporate culture, shared values, etc.), individual resilience (autonomy, situation and personal values, meaning of work, etc.). This work can be done during the crisis (when the organization's resilience is at work), after the crisis (to capitalize on and be strengthened by the lived experience), or even before (to maintain and train resilience).
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In these specific contexts, we help our clients build a more frugal and flexible organization by challenging "pure value", reduced to the bare minimum, with strong structural and governance levers.
The period of crisis is interesting because it allows us to measure and exploit this capacity for resilience: many leaders and entrepreneurs have experienced more agility, risk-taking, experimentation, collective intelligence, solidarity and unprecedented connections between services during the COVID-19 crisis. These organizational and business adjustments will not all be permanent, but some will have an impact on the organization. It will then be necessary to move from experimentation forced by the situation to sustainable implementation.