Situation: Driving Change
As part of its emergence from a long and difficult bankruptcy, Hostess Brands charted a new vision for its future and crafted a detailed business strategy. This industry-leading company has strong senior leadership, committed investors and venerable national brands such as Twinkies® and Wonder Bread®. But employees and mid-level leaders were demoralized, unsure of their direction and skeptical about the future.
To move beyond bankruptcy—and build a strong and successful future—Hostess hired Calpurnia to communicate a clear and compelling strategy for the business and engage its people in creating a new kind of company.
Our Strategic Approach
To assist Hostess Brands in achieving its goals, we:
- Gathered employee focus group research to gain insights into employees’ attitudes, opinions and perceptions.
- Worked with the CEO, the senior leadership team and organizational effectiveness leaders to craft their powerful strategic platform and cultural imperatives in a way that connected with leaders and employees at all levels.
- Created a detailed message platform designed to support the leadership team in communicating with one, clear voice, generating awareness and understanding of the new strategies and culture, speaking directly to employee issues and creating a credible, captivating vision for the future.
- Designed emergence day communications that successfully generated excitement, built employee pride and created a strong cultural platform for future communications.
- Developed a communications strategy and tools to engage leaders and help them communicate the vision for the future:
- Executive talking points, speeches, presentations and videos.
- Messaging and executive presentations for training sessions with top 200 leaders to communicate leadership expectations, build commitment to the cultural imperatives, and provide a framework to implement the company’s strategic initiatives.
- Leader guides to cascade the vision and strategies to the sales force and factory floor.
Results
- The campaign turned around negative perceptions and attitudes, engaged leaders and created a framework for success.
- Following the launch, 84 percent of corporate leaders said they believed strongly in the goals and objectives of the New IBC.
- 96 percent said they were personally committed to achieving the company’s goals.