What does a career defining first week of work look like?

Client: 

Texmo Group

Timeline: 

12 Months

Align With Leaders

The leaders of the Texmo Group, a multinational family business, came to us with a problem. They felt their young employees had little connection or loyalty to the company. This led to a high turnover of early-career staff, as people jumped ship for more money somewhere else, sometimes without even working out their agreed notice. 

There were two potential ways to approach this problem. We could look at quick fixes to keep staff in their roles for longer. Or we could take a long-term view, and go beyond the symptom – staff retention – to tackle the root cause – employees’ relationship with their work. 

Texmo’s leaders encouraged us to focus on the latter, and together we decided that the company’s onboarding was a good place to start. If we could create a deeper and more meaningful connection with employees in their very first week, we could create a more invested, engaged and loyal workforce. 

Become The People

We dived deep into the data and discovered that attitudes to work in younger people were changing. In survey after survey, younger generations said they wanted jobs that had a sense of purpose and to work with companies that shared their values. Without that connection, employees would feel free to move from job to job to get a bit more money.

And so we sat down with the Texmo team to understand the purpose that drove its mission. To create the right sort of conversations, you need time and space with the right people, where they can relax, tell stories and reflect on why they do what they do. One such session led to the revelation that the family was working on publishing the memoirs of its founder, Ramana Ramaswamy.

And these memoirs proved to be a treasure trove of ideas for how this man’s purpose and vision built Texmo from day one. We decided to use this very personal story as the foundation on which we could build a longer-lasting relationship between Texmo and its young staff. 

Create New Solutions

The average onboarding process is heavy on information and light on inspiration. There are usually lots of documents to read and long meetings to sit through. We wanted to reimagine onboarding at Texmo as a powerful and memorable experience in various ways. These included: 

• A new strategy for onboarding and a structure for the first week that combined functional tasks and emotional engagement
• An animated fable which tells the story of the company founder and positioned new joiners as continuing his legacy – with illustratations by Freddie Denton
• New company values that reinforced the messages in the short film 

Deliver Sustainable Change

In a family business, the current leaders represent the bridge between past, present and future. We needed to set the team up to build on this purpose-driven strategy and find new ways to apply it. This work included: 

• Frameworks for the HR and people teams to develop future onboarding initiatives 
• Design concepts for public areas like canteens, using the film’s graphics 
• A strategy to embed the company values in other processes, like annual reviews 

Contact Us

If you’re curious how we could collaborate, we’re ready to talk: [email protected]

Improve, all ways.

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