Case Study: Alpha Natural Resources
Fingerprints: Engaging employees in defining the company's mission, vision and values
THE CHALLENGE
As two companies were merging to create the third-largest coal producer in the United States, Alpha’s Executive Leadership Team (ELT) developed a short-term Mission, Vision and Values (MVV) mainly centered on stabilizing the business and meeting strenuous integration commitments to its shareholders and customers. As the merger’s one-year anniversary approached, the ELT decided to develop a MVV 2.0, with a launch scheduled for the one-year anniversary of the merger close. Actively engaging employees across Alpha’s diverse employee base – spanning six business units with 29 deep mines, 25 surface mines, 17 coal preparation plants and eight offices in six states – all within two weeks, presented a monumental challenge.
OUR WORK
OTSP developed an adaptable toolkit of instructions, qualitative questionnaires, quantitative surveys and feedback capture/summary forms allowing trained Continuous Improvement (CI) coordinators to solicit input from employees in a variety of formats appropriate to each work environment. In addition, the Communication team provided each CI coordinator with a Flip Cam to keep following the project, with which they were able to record spontaneous employee discussions during the input process.
The team synthesized all of the inputs into a proposed MVV 2.0 and tested it with a subset of employees in the field before presenting it to the entire executive team.
THE RESULTS
Employees were engaged in a process and dialogue to create a more meaningful MVV – a broad cross-section of employees representing every business unit, level and location were included in a rapid and adaptable process. The resulting MVV 2.0 was simple, memorable and resonated with employees. The MVV 2.0 was successfully launched to coincide with the one-year anniversary celebrations planned at all sites as part of a campaign by the project deadline.
