Client: Global Food Service Retailer

The context

Global economic and market shifts, coupled with evolving consumer and talent trends, required our client to realign corporate functional capabilities and investments to support the company’s global growth strategy. ZRG was engaged to partner with cross-functional leaders to conduct an organizational diagnostic and provide recommendations to align culture, leadership, talent, structure/roles, and resource levels with the most critical strategic priorities. Senior leadership would later review all recommendations and make key resourcing decisions across the teams. The project was viewed as a vital business initiative, and timing for developing and implementing changes was very aggressive.

Our approach

ZRG conducted a diagnostic of organizational effectiveness and efficiency for 12+ global corporate functions, including HR, IT, Finance, Tax/Treasury, Marketing, Communications, Operations, and Training. Additionally, we:

• Created and trained HR Business Partners on a toolkit and approach to assist with the assessment process and help engage functional leaders and teams
• Conducted activity surveys for each function’s current work to identify and quantify opportunities to streamline, focus, and increase overall effectiveness
• Gained valuable insights through interviews with leaders and stakeholders, then provided robust recommendations for each corporate function
• Facilitated sessions with each functional leader to determine the most impactful areas to address, including changes to structure and roles, activities, processes, capabilities, and communications; we also identified change management considerations
• Guided functional leaders to create go-forward recommendations to present to the executive steering committee
• Shared insights around critical cross-functional opportunities and risks identified for the executive steering committee
• Provided 1:1 advising to the CHRO for additional detailed design of HR Operating Model

The results

The objective was to provide a holistic functional diagnostic that identified key opportunities to reposition corporate resources to drive the company’s growth strategy while ensuring cost-effectiveness. Involvement of global function leaders, business stakeholders, and HR created buy-in and resulted in a pragmatic, aligned approach. Our cross-functional insights revealed organization-wide opportunities and risks not previously addressed by individual functions.

Our expertise

Organizational Effectiveness, Organizational Design

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