Essity is setting the stage to become the undisputed global leader in hygiene and health with their new global supply chain strategy. During a three-day Warm Up-event, 150 site managers engaged in a gamified learning experience to understand the company’s new strategic initiatives.
Essity recently launched their new global supply chain (GSC) strategy, emphasising nine strategic initiatives aimed at elevating the company’s operations. To present the new strategy, the GSC president along with his team, decided to bring together 150 site managers for a three-day Warm-Up event of interactive learning and dialogue.
Scroll to view the flow and agenda for the project.
The ambition was to create an interactive and engaging learning event, moving away from the traditional conference-format. Instead of a three-day sit-down in an auditorium, the GSC team wanted to create enthusiasm around the new direction and strategic initiatives, fostering a shared mindset among leaders.
Day 1 focused on introducing the strategy to site managers, going through important topics such as consumer perspectives and safety culture. The purpose of the event was to recognise where the company is today and where they aim to go. An important objective was also to ensure that managers understand their role in this change and how they can contribute to the company’s vision of becoming “an end-to-end customer centric supply chain you can trust”.
Specifique was tasked with developing a learning design for day 2 of the event, where the site managers would be divided into teams and brought out into breakout rooms.
Taking inspiration from the successful I Care-project, the GSC leaders wanted to use a similar learning approach to formally introduce their new GSC strategy to site managers.
The concept was named “The Global Learning Journey“. Specifique acted as the architect for an interactive and educational experience, utilising gamification principles. The objective was to foster engagement, encourage networking, and enhance understanding of the strategic initiatives through interactive learning and collaboration.
The 150 leaders were divided into seven teams and challenged to participate in a series of escape room-activities across 7 different studios, each representing a strategic pillar in Essity’s new GSC strategy. 5 rooms followed a traditional escape room-approach, where 20 minutes were spent on hands-on puzzles and challenges that sparked curiosity and primed participants for deeper learning. After completing the challenges, a dialogue session and Q&A was facilitated by the respective initiative owners, acting as the studio hosts. Participants were able to discuss and ask questions regarding the new strategic initiatives, and understand their role in realising the new strategy. In the last two studios we developed an alternative set-up to create variation.
In the escape room-studios, the teams were further divided into subteams, where each subteam was to complete two tasks each: Firstly an easy icebreaker-activity, followed by a more difficult main task requiring collaborative thinking and team discussions. Solving each task would provide subteams with a code for a padlock, one for the icebreaker task and one for the main task. The padlock from the main task would open a box in the middle of the room with a timer and studio certificate. To open the box, all four subteams had to solve their main task, stop the timer, and receive their certificate. The more time efficient the team was, the better score.
The teams were measured on three winning criteria:
- Time efficiency
- Collaboration and teamwork
- Active participation during the Q&A session
Based on these criteria, the teams would receive gold tokens at the end of each studio session, based on their performance. The exact amount given to each team was not revealed until the end of the day. The team with the most gold tokens would become the winning team and be celebrated at the end of the day.
To finish off the event, day 3 was spent on reflections from the teams and dialogue between site managers and top management. All participants got a chance to comment on what they had learned, and what they would do differently moving forward. They also received tools that would help them communicate the new GSC strategy to their own teams.
The feedback from both participants and the GSC leadership team was overwhelmingly positive. The event spiked motivation and inspiration among site managers, showing great support and engagement from all levels.
Over the next three years, Essity will continue the implementation of the nine strategic initiatives to become an end-to-end customer centric supply chain you can trust.
