Who we work with

 We’ve helped teams across some of today’s biggest companies to drive change in a new way.

CHALLENGE

The President of Levi Strauss Europe, recognized the untapped potential of female colleagues across the region and wanted to equip and empower this team to take on leadership opportunities. His goal was to create a strong community of female leaders that could create business value and meaningful impact for Levi.

Our Approach

We helped the team at Levi Europe design and facilitate a two-day Women’s Leadership Summit in Brussels, Belgium. To set an empathetic tone, we started by asking participants to share their concerns, future aspirations and support needed to get there. Their insights helped us design an audience-centric experience to jumpstart this community of powerful female leaders. 

Impact

The Summit was a clear investment in diversity and inclusion, and greatly increased employee’s trust in leadership and deepened their commitment to the company. Creating a forum for female leaders to be vulnerable, transparent and authentic in voicing what they needed to thrive at Levi increased employee engagement and wellbeing. Most importantly, equipping female leaders with tools, resources and connections empowered them to drive greater impact for themselves and for Levi Europe.

“Signe Group were invaluable partners in designing and facilitating our company’s first women’s leadership summit—an event several attendees called the best experience they’ve ever had at LS&Co. They rigor around designing an event to meet our business objectives and their flexibility in tailoring the event to a very diverse group of women were equally appreciated. We were thrilled with the level of engagement from the women at the summit and the spark of energy it provided us as we begin to focus more on women’s leadership as part of our company’s diversity and inclusion priorities.”

— Kate Wagner, Senior Director Of Corporate Affairs @ LS&Co

CHALLENGE

Rakuten Marketing had ambitious revenue goals to meet and an inspiring new vision to launch that would require major shifts in the way the digital marketing organization operated. Bringing this vision to life required bringing employees along a journey of major structural changes – employees who had already seen their fair share of leadership turnover, layoffs and restructures.

Our Approach

Rakuten Marketing engaged Signe on this change journey, which required a holistic approach to transformation. We knew that a successful transformation required clearly defining the company vision for the leadership team and beyond, strategic planning at the team level to determine what must be done to meet this vision, and engaging the employee population to activate the plans.

During the clarifying phase, Signe designed and facilitated strategy sessions to align the leadership team on a compelling story to cascade through the organization, and coordinated strategic planning meetings that assessed the restructure change impacts to teams and individuals and determined what must be done to support a successful transition. With a clear vision and strategy in place, we brought together employees from across the organization for a two-day meeting called “Playbook” to bring them into the conversation and surface additional actions to take. Throughout the year, as more changes were carried out, we developed strategic communications that addressed the change impacts and reinforced the vision and the rationale for changes. We brought a group of employees from across the organization for a second “Playbook” to share progress and launch a community of “culture warriors” to cascade the latest developments with employees and share back feedback and insights with the leadership team.

Impact

In an organization rife with directional changes and sudden organizational movements that had complained of a lack of transparency and communication, we helped leaders manage a pivotal year with very little voluntary turnover. As we supported the RM leaders to carry out the evolution of their business, we aligned a new leadership team, implemented a communication COE and developed change management capabilities within the organization. One employee in the second Playbook meeting stated: “Compared to last year, there is clear defined direction of where company and our product is going.”

CHALLENGE

In March of 2017, at the peak of the #MeToo movement, there was a momentous call-to-action to drastically improve the working experience of females, with a bright spotlight on the film industry. Mercer, an HR consulting firm, recognized an opportunity to bring their wealth of HR and diversity & inclusion data into the conversation by hosting a conference with the biggest names and policy-makers in Hollywood. This conference would give Mercer access to a new client base in a fairly untapped industry where they could play a major role in addressing gender equality and women’s rights.

Our Approach

Mercer’s “When Women Thrive” practice held a massive amount of data about women in the workplace, and the practice leaders wanted to partner with change agents in the film industry – including Women in Film and Sundance Institute – to have a meaningful conversation about the issues that had been surfacing in their industry and build out impactful next steps. Mercer engaged Signe to help design and facilitate a one-day event that could highlight the importance of Diversity & Inclusion data in a way that would move the conversation forward.

We knew that getting to that goal required more than just the eye-opening data that Mercer brought and the powerful experiences Women in Film provided – it meant creating a safe space for participants to interact and relate with the data, share their own insights and experiences, be authentic and vulnerable about challenges and ultimately, feel inspired and impassioned by their collective power to truly enact change. As the facilitator, Katie played a key role setting the welcoming, authentic and empathetic tone required to unite this community of participants and inspire them to tap into their emotional and professional needs to problem-solve together.

Impact

By creating the conditions for women of all diverse backgrounds – from well-known female directors to women newer to the industry – to comfortably share insights and learn from each other, Mercer and the co-hosts were able to build awareness around the latest D&I policies being enacted to gain support, and gain more insights to bring back to their organizations.