Takeda engages people and process muscle to drive ultimate customer centricity

• Award Recipient

  Takeda

• Accolade

  

  Winner

• Category

  

  People and Process Change

• What put this entry over the top

  Business leaders recognize that successfully driving engagement, productivity, and change requires the ability to bring people, processes, and technology together in a fluid and meaningful way, but the talent equation is just that—an equation with many inputs. TBS had the opportunity to design and implement an innovative talent strategy from scratch that encompasses the complexities of talent management with a “OneOffice” approach. The talent strategy is people centric, with a dedicated effort to optimize each phase of the employee experience from end to end. A shared focus on process optimization with an innovation mindset means TBS is constantly striving to improve the organization, its people, ways of working, and, ultimately, its outcomes and commitment to patient care.

The Situation: “People, process, technology” is a time-tested competency framework for companies. But in today’s rush to modernize, technology often overpowers the narrative at the expense of people and processes. For organizations like Takeda that have undergone massive change through merger and acquisition activity, success is not a function of technology but of managing people and process change.

In early 2019, Takeda completed its $62 billion acquisition of international biotech firm Shire in one of the largest biopharmaceutical mergers in history. Since the acquisition, Takeda has undergone significant transformations with the global integration of people, solutions, and processes to accommodate its employee base, which grew from approximately 25,000 employees to 50,000 globally.

Takeda Business Solutions (TBS), Takeda’s global business services arm, was a critical enabler of the integration. It identified the immediate need to reestablish, strengthen, and accelerate its people agenda by designing an intelligent talent management strategy to attract, develop, and retain the best talent. To build “One Takeda” with a OneOffice culture, it was critical to hone best-in-class solutions, harmonize processes, and align ways of working with a constant pulse on people experience.

Takeda has been designated as a winner of the HFS OneOffice™ Awards for its comprehensive approaches to people and process change that universally align to its North Star—innovative patient care.

The Solution: TBS built its brand upon a mission to ensure every employee feels connected to Takeda’s purpose and patients; with customer centricity at its core, TBS offers continuous learning and development opportunities enabling employees to develop next-generation capabilities

An organization’s customer base does not solely consist of its end consumer. Customer centricity encompasses partners, suppliers, end customers, and employees. Takeda is a biopharmaceutical company focused on four therapeutic areas: oncology, rare diseases, neuroscience, and gastroenterology. It also makes strategic R&D investments in plasma-derived therapies and vaccines. Its goal is simple and clear: to develop and deliver life-saving treatments and therapies to improve the lives of patients and thread the patient story, end to end, across all its customers.

As part of TBS’ onboarding program, “The Best First @TBS,” which consists of targeted messaging and enablement to create the best first day, first week, first month, and first quarter, new hires participate in the Patient Connections program. Patient Connections is an immersive program connecting the employee to real patient stories; it offers engagement with the patient and concludes with a period of team reflection. Regardless of an employee’s position in the company, Takeda seeks to provide a direct line of sight to the patient, imbuing a strong sense of purpose it believes is critical for performance and a better understanding of how every employee’s role impacts patients’ lives.

The link to purpose is paired with a new curriculum for capability building across “One Takeda,” which bridges curated continuous learning, on-demand coaching, internal mobility, and a focus on continuous innovation through initiatives such as the Finance Digital Champions Program and READY (Reimagine, Empower, Achieve, Data, and You) Program. For example, the Finance Digital Champions Program creates digital champions trained to deal with high-volume, repetitive transactional work and equipped with skills to identify problems and develop solutions, including building bots using robotic process automation (RPA).

These programs are just two of many available to every employee, equipping the organization with new behaviors and skillsets to harmonize change management and process improvement and drive problem solving within a team ethos.

The Results: A human-centric approach to talent connects people and purpose with employee engagement and enablement

Call it what you will, “The Great Resignation,” “The Great Reshuffle,” or even “The Great Attraction,” the workforce is moving in masses for a multitude of reasons, including seeking purposeful work. One of the hardest metrics to pull for any organization is the connection of its employees to its purpose, which is considered a key attribute for satisfaction and retention. TBS’ Patient Connections program has already seen employees’ understanding of the patient journey increase from an average of 7.3 to a 9.4 out of 10. In addition, the overall evaluation of the Patient Connections program ranked a 9.8 out of 10.

Reimagining processes is an integral part of the talent equation because it flattens the enterprise. Process redesign does not have to sit within IT; it supersedes silos, connects the front to the back, and enables talent to team with technology and treat the customer. Takeda’s Finance Digital Champions Program has seen TBS, in partnership with IT, train more than 1,700 employees to develop 512 bots to execute automated manual, time-consuming tasks. In doing so, it has created more than 514,000 productivity hours and delivered significant efficiencies in finance processes such as Record-to-Report, Invoice-to-Cash, and Source-to-Pay.

Breaking silos and flattening the enterprise are not only matters for process redesign. They are imperatives for listening and feedback programs to ensure that the voice of the employee may be heard. Takeda uses two key approaches for its employee listening programs: enterprise-wide employee experience surveys and quarterly face-to-face forums for each business unit. When it comes to “connectedness” and “engagement,” TBS’ results in Takeda’s Employee Experience Survey have shown a steady increase in this priority area, improving from 73% before the pandemic to 79% in fiscal year 2021—a nod to the successes of its talent initiatives. In parallel, “well-being” has improved from 64% before the pandemic to 68% in the same period.

The Bottom Line: Takeda’s talent strategy brings people and process change to the core of innovative patient care

Business leaders recognize that successfully driving engagement, productivity, and change requires the ability to bring people, processes, and technology together in a fluid and meaningful way, but the talent equation is just that—an equation with many inputs. TBS had the opportunity to design and implement an innovative talent strategy from scratch that encompasses the complexities of talent management with a “OneOffice” approach. The talent strategy is people centric, with a dedicated effort to optimize each phase of the employee experience from end to end. A shared focus on process optimization with an innovation mindset means TBS is constantly striving to improve the organization, its people, ways of working, and, ultimately, its outcomes and commitment to patient care.