CULTURE & TRANSFORMATION: Building A Customer-Centric Culture at Danish Engineering Firm COWI

As I have shared previously, one of the greatest joys of writing this series of interviews is the opportunity to meet fascinating people at great organizations I’d never have met otherwise. COWI, a Danish engineering firm headquartered near Copenhagen, is just such an example. COWI have been in operation for almost 100-years with storied success around the world. Their transformation journey was sparked – like so many I’ve interviewed – by a realization their business strategy needed a significant overhaul if they were to flourish in the current (and future) economy. I sat down, sadly over ZOOM not a face-to-face coffee, with Thomas Grondorf, Head of Internal, Strategy and Financial Communications to understand this new strategic transformation and the crucial cultural changes COWI made to accelerate that new vision.?????

HB: So great to meet you, Thomas. Having been on the COWI website and seen what a remarkable sustainability story you have, I can’t wait to discuss how your organization has transformed over the past few years.

For readers unfamiliar with COWI can we start with some background on the company and your role too? For a start am I even pronouncing the name correctly?

TG: <Laughs> Good effort on the pronunciation Hilton.? In Denmark we

pronounce it KO-V-EEE and we’re a 94-year-old engineering consultancy. We proudly say that we’re global technical experts within infrastructure, sustainable energy and buildings. So, if you need a new suspension bridge or tunnel, then we’d be one of the first people you’d call. We’ve been involved with some incredible projects over the years like the Canakkale bridge and the Copenhagen Metro, and in recent years as an outcome of our company’s green transition, several green hydrogen projects and many offshore wind projects.??

My title at COWI is Head of Internal, Strategy and Financial Communications. So, I'm a classical corporate communications leader who's been working in large corporations for plus 20 years. My trademark is leadership communication, change communication and handling organizational changes. That has placed me in a central position to help craft, lead, and nurture key elements of the COWI transformation we’ve been on for the past several years.?

?HB: Great synopsis. Let’s get into the COWI transformation. What drove the impetus to transform and how has the journey been thus far?

TG:? No surprises but this all started with a strategic review and asking ourselves a simple but critical set of questions – What will the world look like in a decade and how would we engineer our company to remain relevant??

Throughout my career, I’ve been involved in countless annual planning sessions where you draw a short-term horizon, say 3 or 5 years, but your mind really stretches to different possibilities and challenges when you establish a much longer horizon. For our team we established a +10-year horizon which really spurred great discussion and great introspection for our leadership team. We collaborated with the Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies to understand trends and their potential impact on society, our customers and us. Certain trends – like technology and sustainability – were ones we saw as only increasing in importance. Fortunately, we already had a deep expertise in those areas but sustainability has become such a critical requirement to operate today and it needed a different approach than the one we were used to have.???? ?

What quickly emerged was that, despite our great credentials in engineering and sustainability, we’d been very insular in how we talked about ourselves and how we showed up in the market. Candidly we could come across as a bit arrogant?about our engineering brilliance and technical smarts because we focused too much on our ‘product’ and less our customer. What were their objectives or grand ambitions? What – and importantly why – had they chosen to build the amazing building or structure they had? What were they dreaming about? What were their concerns? What positive impact on the world were they seeking to make? What would they therefore need from us? Who would we need to become??

When you put it as plainly as the questions above, our customers were a crucially important element but we’d not explicitly made them the very core of our strategy.? With that realization, anchoring the COWI transformation on establishing a genuine customer-centricity became an obvious and urgent agenda across all aspects of the company.??

HB: Fascinating and, as you say, when you start asking “what would our customer’s need us to become in order to stay relevant”, the opportunities and challenges can become quite obvious. So where did the COWI transformation start???

TG: In our approach we looked at a number of immediate, and new, levers we could create or pull. Some were obvious – like communication language and symbols – and some were new processes and initiatives that explicitly highlighted our deep focus on customer-centricity.

Let me give you some examples.

In our communications our language and our visual identity changed immediately. Less talk about our engineering feats, more focus on human, down-to-earth narratives, and the value we co-created with customers and for society as a whole. Less imagery of impressive bridges and tunnels and more, you guessed it <laughs> humans, real people playing on one of the concrete playgrounds we’ve created, people watching the sunrise from a bridge we built and so on. Again, a focus on humans and people. The humans and people our clients were building for.

Then there were transformations like appointing a Chief Business Development Officer to our Executive Leadership Team to boost growth and business development as well as put customers centre in what we do. Additionally building out simple meeting rituals like ending internal meetings by asking “how would our customers react to the decisions we’ve made today?”

We made other critical changes. Like how we reported on our business and the business we would pursue or no longer seek out. For instance, in our reporting all customer KPIs were reported first, then employee KPIs, sustainability KPIs and then business performance KPIs – showing our prioritization. Everything starts with the customer.

The most profound change in our FUTURE-NOW strategy was a unilateral decision to no longer pursue any fossil fuel projects, and that 100% of our revenue must come from projects driving sustainability. If we were going to truly be committed to sustainability – as our vision and strategy explained – then fossil fuels and adding to the global carbon footprint could no longer be how we operated. The impact? An immediate reduction in revenue of several hundred millions in Danish Kroner but that’s how committed we were to this strategy.???

In our business about 50% comes from winning proposals and 50% from growing existing business. For a long time we have measured customer satisfaction – the Net Promoter Score – but in recent years we have worked to be more structured and strategic with the NPS insights because we can see that there is a direct link between the NPS and repeat business. When a customer gives us a bad score, we now instantly follow up with the customer to understand why we were scored low and how we can change this perception. This is a key reason why our NPS has increased from 37 in 2020 to 57 in 2023. On the winning proposals effort, we’ve radically changed how we approach to proposals. We invested in really listening to the customers focusing on what are they dreaming about – what are their concerns – and how can we translate our technical expertise and solutions into something that creates value for them. This change has resulted in a significant higher win rate, for the largest projects it is now above 70%. ?

Those we don’t win we go back and rigorously review using our values of “We are Curious” and “We are Courageous” – the latter because that’s all about looking for new ways to improve. It’s one thing to say you are customer-centric, it’s another to audit and refine every aspect of your business to deliver on that.

HB:? That’s an amazing set of examples Thomas. Taking fossil fuel projects out of your business is just amazing. What I’ve not heard you say is the C-word – Culture. How did the COWI culture transform through this period?

TG:? There were very definite changes in the culture arena. I must congratulate my People and Culture colleagues for the outstanding work and commitment they showed over these past four years.?

Ultimately, we’re placing increased attention on 3 P’s of our transformation.? Purpose, Passion, and Performance. The reality is we need to deliver better results because we need to reinvest way more in our people and in technology to stay competitive and relevant in the future. That’s inescapable.

So, Purpose becomes about having a higher purpose when working for COWI. For us this relates to our vision of shaping a more sustainable and livable world. Today, we are 8,000 employees and in the past couple of years we have welcomed around 2,000 new colleagues. Generally, people mention our purpose as a key reason for joining COWI. They can see how their work contributes to making the planet a better place to live. Passion is an environment where they can really be passionate about their profession. Engineers are incredibly curious and community-based so it has been a deliberate move to build out these active internal communities where that passion can be shared and can flourish.? We believe that we can only make the world a better place to live if our organization has a clear purpose, if people are professionally passionate, and if we deliver strong performances. That's the intent.

Now I'm not an expert on culture like my colleagues, but if you want to boil it down, it's about your behaviors and how your organization and your people show up. What guides what we are actually doing with our colleagues, our clients and our communities? That's why we worked with the values, because that they are actually very good at describing the kind of behaviors we wanted to see among our employees. Back to the carbon footprint decision I mentioned, recently when our chair of COWIfonden, our owners, visited our Danish HQ, he took the train versus flying. That doesn’t sound like a massive sacrifice until you factor in that he lives in the UK and his train trip took him about 15 hours. That’s truly honouring our vision, values and new behaviours. ?Another key element in making our values come to life is that they are now integrated into our people processes. Specifically during each annual people development review employees and managers have deep structured talks about how that employee is living the values. Company-wide we’ve made it known that it is impossible to be promoted if you don’t live our values. ???

We then took the culture piece a level further with the help from Innovisor to truly understand how connected our organization was and who were the real influencers and connectors inside our organization. What I’m talking about is the informal network of an organization. The network of connections that isn’t mapped on your official, classic org chart. When we first explored this idea there was a certain amount of resistance from some of our leaders who didn’t understand, or couldn’t believe, that there were employees with more influence than them and were often employees they didn’t even know.

Thankfully this experiment in leveraging these influencers was something we remained committed to and have seen great results from utilizing them at crucial stages in our transformation.

HB: For the record I’m also a fan of the Innovisor team and have seen how Roche has used their ONA skills. Can you tell me how COWI used this insight into your informal network to accelerate your transformation?

TG: We use this group in a multitude of ways but most often they form an excellent sounding board for our plans, our communications and getting a gauge of the pulse of our organization. I’m not talking about those traditional engagement surveys but something richer and more insightful.?

Again, some real-life examples where the impact of this influencer group has been enormous. Previously, like many organizations, when we wanted to communicate something with our employees, we’d rely too much on our internal portal and assume everyone read and understand exactly what we wanted to communicate. Now any important communications go to this group first for an honest review and evaluation. How will this land? How will this be perceived by your team, your department, your business line? The impact of this move? During the COVID lock-down we executed a standard engagement survey, our vendor back then told us to not expect a response rate above 76% on the key question ”COWI Group is providing timely and relevant information regarding COVID-19 actions” because the extra effort would require too much. We got an 84%. That’s one tangible benefit we’ve seen.??? ???????????

They also play a role in our strategy development. Not as the originators of the strategy as that is an “leadership-down” exercise but, again, as sense makers and honest reviewers to provide guidance – and often advocacy – on how the strategy is positioned internally.???

Basically, we have installed a communication approach that we use in everything we do. We use mass communication to create awareness about something. We then use leadership communication to translate the mass communication into a meaningful context to create understanding. Finally, we use the influencers to create commitment and sense making because trust in these people is much higher compared to the “formal” leadership structure. This approach is also a reason for COWI being able to accelerate our transformation.?

HB: In our earlier conversations you’d mentioned leadership development as another important part of the culture transformation at COWI. Can you share a little more about that and why it is so important for your organization?

TG: Absolutely. It is not just leadership development, but it is about leadership capability. What does leadership look like inside our organization both today but also into that 10-year horizon we’re steering toward. There are obvious skills like leading remote, global teams comprising different nationalities. Skills we’ve had to perfect for decades purely based on the industry we’re in.

In real terms my People and Culture colleagues have created a training program and have trained hundreds of our leaders to ensure we now have the same approach to leadership, have the same understanding of how we are living the values, how we are leading others, how we are leading leaders, and so on. So, it's not necessarily brand new, it's more like the disciplined and structured approach to build those capabilities with speed. Having both the capacity and scalability that we want to have in our leadership cohort is vital if we want to grow as much as we are growing. Leaders are also trained in becoming strong communicators which in my perspective is a key lever to become a truly impactful leader.

One increasingly important objective is creating a feedback culture as well. So as a leader, how do you give continuous, ongoing, constructive feedback to your team. Yep. Sounds simple. However, this is a big challenge for most companies. In my view, you ask people to be leaders but often they remain managers. Managers ask; how's it going with the project? Are you on time? Or what about the budget? what is happening? They manage, they don’t lead. Leaders ask; what did we learn from the last interaction we had with the customer? What could we do differently? What new customer experience skills and capabilities are you learning. We don't do all this on a daily basis. And I think that's a big risk because a lot of leaders are not leading, they are just managing. You need employees who can do both naturally and effectively. ?

So, the leaders we’re looking to build are the ones who ask the leadership questions, not only the manager ones. They’re also ones capable and willing to inject fun into the environment. That’s a key one we look for. Also, an ability to make small talk. In leadership work, time and again I’ve found that leaders who can make small talk – how is you son doing in soccer, are you still sailing in the summer, aren’t you an avid skier – are the people who can genuinely connect with their teams on a deeper human level. That’s such a vital aspect of the leadership capability.

HB: I just love how tangible those examples are and how impactful. Brilliant. Final question. What advice would you give to a peer embarking on a similar transformation like the one at COWI?

TG: Some advice is a cliché, but it doesn’t make it any less crucial when you start.

Be very very clear about what you’re trying to achieve and why. It’s obvious but I firmly believe that a good part of this successful and ongoing customer-centric transformation is that our people genuinely understand why we chosen this path, how this path will lead to growth, and how they as individuals can contribute. Growth of the business but also personal growth for them.????

Now my secret transformation sauce – humour.

I tell my colleagues, if we have fun together, two things happen. We release energy, which we really need when we want to collaborate. The other thing is when we can have a laugh together, you also want to work together again. So, you immediately strengthen the relationship.

I think if we can build a culture based on humor, we can really accelerate some of the transformations that we want to do. And that's what I'm trying to infuse into the organization. So when I do these internal interviews with the CEO and all the senior leaders, there's always a smile. There's always a little joke. And that kind of infuses into the organization. That's my personal hope at least.

HB: Humour as a transformation accelerant. That is truly a first Thomas. I must say I can see the very human element and connection in that insight. Smart, really smart. Thank you for you time and my best for continued success at COWI. Tak skal du have Thomas.

TG:? ?Selv Tak Hilton

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If you liked this interview, be sure to check out others from this ongoing series on my website. I also have a series of free e-books and interview collations that you can download for free.

If you have a culture transformation story you'd like to share, don't hesitate to reach out. I am always fascinated to understand which leaders and which companies genuinely see their culture as a source of competitive advantage.

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