Maintaining organizational culture
To make a transformation from a research-oriented organization to a fully running production on an industrial scale. Not only in FTE, but also in organizational philosophy. And all this while maintaining the organizational culture. It was not an easy challenge facing the scale-up Protix. In the middle of their growth phase, they engaged us to guide the complete transformation. And with success.
Protix is a rapidly growing scale-up. They are the leading company in industrial insect breeding and processing into proteins and fats. Protix's customers use these proteins and fats to produce animal feed. This makes feed for chickens, pigs but also pets a lot more sustainable and prevents overfishing for fishmeal or forest clearing for soybean cultivation.
Protix's growth was not about scaling up a little. The scale-up was growing so fast that it needed an additional workforce of 35 to 50 new employees. This completely new team was needed to staff Protix's new plant. Not an easy task! In doing so, it was important to build in structure for a more professional organization, to move HR forward and to have all operational matters in order. At the same time, the core values and organizational culture had to be preserved.
Know what your core values are in three steps.
Workshops and Training Courses
So how do you best tackle such a big challenge? For starters, we organized ongoing workshops and training sessions with managers to keep a grip on the performance and direction of the team (Read here what to do in case of non-performance). Furthermore, we looked at what the impact of internal communication was. What is the message and how does it affect the departments? For the managers it was also important to learn how to get the best out of their team. For this we organized several activities and (team building) activities.
Finding a new team and getting them ready to work in the new plant was obviously a massive project. Where do you find the people who have the right pioneering spirit and fit the current organizational culture? Soon Protix found out that through the regular route of posting job openings and reviewing resumes would not work. So we decided to do it differently. We organized speed dates and events that attracted many more candidates than expected. The next challenge was to maintain the Protix culture while growing on such a large scale. We overcame this hurdle by outlining a framework of core values and communicating this to candidates at events and presentations. The application process was also designed accordingly. Also during the onboarding we paid a lot of attention to the core values. The result is that all new people fit the Protix organizational culture.
Scaling up while preserving culture
We helped Protix scale up and transform into a revolving industrial insect production operation. With a completely new workforce, the scale-up made a shift from the research-focused organization.
We managed to hire a new team for the new plant within a year. By not losing sight of the organizational culture throughout the recruitment process, we were able to embed the core values in the new team and in the growing organization. Pioneering is still an important pillar in this regard.
Interested in the ultimate recruitment process? Read our blog! Or get in touch with one of our recruiters.
In addition, we introduced structure to the HR work, which led to a professionalization of the company. Every team leader and manager received a toolbox of tools and training to guide and mentor their team. Young managers were coached so that they could perform their new roles with much more confidence. As a result, each department grew not only in FTE, but also in maturity.
Wondering how we can help you? Feel free to contact for an informal conversation. Or take a look at one of our other cases.
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