A week of direct dialogue between plant management and the shop floor
Maison AubrelleInvented name
After a record year and then a sharp downturn, the production teams of a major house were worried about their future. Over one week, plant management met every workshop, group after group, using the same frame: the road travelled, the questions, live answers, then what to keep, improve, stop or start. Every question received a written answer.
- Sector
- Luxury goods, a house within a major group
- Size
- Several hundred production staff
- Format
- A week of half-day sessions
- In the room
- Production teams from several sites (manufacturing, packaging, logistics, maintenance), welcomed in successive groups, facing plant management.
Context
- After an exceptional year, business fell back sharply. Profit-sharing shrank and talk of job cuts was circulating elsewhere in the industry.
- Worries about jobs and about the future of some brands were surfacing through every channel except the right one.
- Plant management wanted to speak directly to the shop floor, without a hierarchical filter, and leave with their ideas.
The challenge
Open a real dialogue in a tense climate: let every question be asked, including the hardest ones, answer frankly, and not stop at the worries. The teams also had to leave with proof that they had been heard.
The design
Key ideas
Start with the road travelled
Each session opens on what the teams have achieved over the past years, sorted into broad themes: safety, craft, environment, team spirit. The dialogue starts from shared pride, not from the crisis.
Every question on the table
Participants write their questions to management, with no prior screening. They are grouped by heading and management answers them live, in front of everyone.
Keep, improve, stop, start
Once the answers are given, the room moves on to proposals on a four-column grid. The director responds at the end of the session to what he has heard.
One frame, a growing memory
The frame is the same for every group. Notes taken live are consolidated from one session to the next: you can see which questions keep coming back and how much they really weigh across the workshops.
How the time was used
- Open
- Explore
- Decide
- Celebrate
In each session
Open
Welcome
The day’s group facing plant management, with the ground rule set: anything can be asked.
Open
The road travelled
Achievements of recent years, sorted by broad theme.
Explore
The questions
Everyone writes their own. They are grouped by heading.
Explore
The answers
Management answers live, heading by heading.
Decide
Commit
Keep, improve, stop, start: the room’s proposals.
Decide
Responses
The director picks up the proposals and says what he will do with them.
After the week
Decide
Consolidation
Notes from every session brought together in four documents: achievements, questions, answers, proposals.
Celebrate
Written answers
One consolidated question and one official answer per theme, handed over to be shared with everyone.
The seminar in miniature
Welcome
Every half-day, a new group from the workshops sits facing plant management, with no layers of hierarchy in between. The frame is set from the start: anything can be asked, including the hardest questions about jobs and the future of the brands.
The road travelled
The session opens with what the teams have achieved over several years, displayed by broad theme: safety, skills, environment, team. The dialogue starts from shared pride, not the crisis, and the questions that follow take a different tone.
The questions
By table, everyone writes their own questions for management, with no prior screening. They are then grouped by heading, which shows straight away what weighs most on the day’s group. Worries that had been circulating elsewhere finally come through the right channel.
Live answers
Heading by heading, management answers in front of everyone. A participant stands, the microphone goes round, and the answer comes on the spot. Notes taken live are pooled from one session to the next, to see which questions keep coming back.
Keep, improve, stop, start
Once the answers are given, the room moves on to proposals. In small groups, people fill a four-column grid with sticky notes. From one session to the next, recurring ideas are flagged, such as the need for communication between sites.
The director responds
In a circle, the director goes back over the proposals he has just heard and says what he will do with them. After the week, each consolidated question gets an official written answer, handed over to be shared with everyone. That is what proves, afterwards, that management listened.
The materials, redrawn
The same running order, session after session
Keep, improve, stop, start
Comes up from one session to the next
Deliverables and follow-up
- Four consolidated documents: achievements, questions, answers, proposals.
- A table of official answers, theme by theme, with figures on the economics of the house, handed to the teams a few days after the last session.
- Monthly follow-up meetings, and ideas put under study, including working-time arrangements and job swaps between departments.
What we take away
- In a tense climate, opening on the road travelled changes the quality of the questions that follow. People talk differently about the future once they have remembered what they built.
- A written answer to every question is worth more than a good speech. It is what proves, afterwards, that management listened.
- Repeating the same frame group after group shows what really matters. The need for communication between sites came out stronger than management expected.
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