One of the most important competitive advantages any organisation has is its people. At Moelven, they call it Active Employeeship, an initiative built on the belief that every employee should be involved and take responsibility for the company’s development, working environment, and performance.
Moelven is a Scandinavian industrial group with operations across several countries. “People” is defined as one of the three pillars in their strategy. To help bring that strategy to life, and as a direct investment in the working environment across the organisation, a comprehensive initiative around active employeeship was developed. The content had to feel concrete and relevant right down to the individual and team level, while still ensuring that local discussions everywhere followed the same shared framework.
In collaboration with Effect Management, Specifique developed the concept for the project, based on Professor Stefan Tengblad’s research into active employeeship. For the initiative, we designed a dialogue tool in two versions: a fully analogue dialogue mat for all employees, including leaders, and a dedicated version aimed specifically at leaders, featuring visual references to the organisation’s leadership principles. Our digital learning platform, Diggle, was used to capture input and results through the rollout and during workshops.
The work began in autumn 2019 with a mobilisation phase and an initial pulse survey, followed by a pilot in early 2020. We used a top-down approach for the rollout process, starting with the organisation’s executive leadership team. The initiative was further cascaded down and out across the wider organisation following a train-the-trainer session facilitated jointly by Effect and Specifique. The pandemic put some sessions on hold in 2020, which led to the development of digital versions of the learning tools that could run directly within Microsoft Teams. In 2022, a dedicated leadership programme was developed to further support the initiative.
The programme has grown from a pilot into a permanent, company-wide initiative. More than 3400 employees across 40 locations in Norway and Sweden have now been part of the project, and client feedback on how it has shaped the group’s working environment has been positive.
