Developing Strategic Clarity with a Future Focus at Randstad Australia
RANDSTAD
Over the course of 10 years, Randstad Australia has been on a major transformative journey in which it has evolved from a multitude of many different organisations to being a powerhouse providing specialised recruitment & HR solutions for a broad range of skills & disciplines under one brand, Randstad.
TRANSFORMATION • ADAPTIVE LEADERSHIP • STRATEGY • WAYS OF WORKING
THE OPPORTUNITY
Whilst a global company, Randstad Australia is made up of 750 people with offices all over Australia. Since March 2020, the business has undergone a significant restructure, recruited a new CEO and experienced a global pandemic, all whilst working remotely.
The executive team is a highly experienced group of leaders, many having worked in the business for 7+ years and the business has prospered. However, the best leaders know that an outside eye can be extremely valuable, so Randstad Australia engaged Neu21 to facilitate, guide and co-create their 2025 strategy; coordinate the vast 16-person leadership team; and design an adaptive leadership culture that would sustain future focus and momentum despite inevitable challenges ahead.
OUR APPROACH
As with all our clients we customised our services to deliver on their specific needs; delivering five, three hour remote sessions enabling the leaders the ability to focus for short sharp periods of time, take care of their business needs and have time each day to reflect strategically on each days output.
1. DISCOVERY: PRE-READING
We started with strategic foresight to gather systematic, participatory intelligence in which we provide stimulus of the emerging trends in a range of different sectors, and we start to collectively make sense of them.
Providing this as pre-reading supported the development of their vision and strategy to better enable the leadership team to consider a future back approach, and then ideate around future direction of the business over the next 5-10 years.
2. DESIGN: STRATEGY CO-DESIGN
Anchoring the teams thinking around the emerging trends of the future, we facilitated the strategy codesign across three horizons – modernising the core; creating the new and disrupting the game. The team co-designed the strategy with greater clarity of the requirements for the immediate-, medium- and longer-term future.
3. DEVELOP: STRATEGY VISUALISATION
As we co-designed their strategy we simultaneously visualised their work using digital tools such as MIRO and Trello to support with ongoing discussion, progress tracking and breaking down of the work into 90 day cycles.
4. DELIVER: TEAM WAYS OF WORKING TO OPTIMISE EXECUTION
Collaboration is a key component of success both during development and execution of strategy, therefore we worked with the team to codesign the rituals, routines and ways of working together. This forms the foundation of the leadership teams culture and serves to enable the teams to effectively execute upon the strategic goals.
The Results —
Working with the Randstad team was incredibly rewarding. Each person bought their unique skills, experience and knowledge to the table and together we co-created their 5-year vision and strategic roadmap. Perhaps the success of the approach is not so much in what we achieved but in how we achieved it. Each of the individuals had an active seat at the table, each voice was heard; and while not every idea made it into the strategy, the collective voice determined the path forward for the next three years.
A 2025 vision as the NorthStar for where they wanted to head and what they want to achieve
Vision
Their leadership purpose as means to align on why they are a team and what they wanted to be known for throughout the organisation
Leading Change
The strategic drivers taking into consideration the internal and external forces and influences in the future which were used to focus their strategy . Owners of each of the drivers and initiatives to ensure clear accountability and pairing the right people with the right driver or initiative based upon skill, will and experience.
Strategic Dynamics
Our engagement intended to stop after the five sessions, however the CEO recognised the success of our approach and asked us to continue to support the execution of their strategy and the road ahead for next 12 months to ensure momentum, accountability and clarity is maintained.
Sustained Support
A three-year strategic roadmap providing clarity and alignment of specific needs at all levels, including functional, organisation-wide and even collaboration between organisations. Twelve-month initiatives – based on their 3 year roadmap they constructed thoughts around what needs focus in the first 12 months to ensure the entire strategy succeeded.
Roamap Clarity
“Best output I’ve seen in the last 4 years”