The story
BRP had recently articulated a purpose the company and its employees had always felt: "We exist to create new ways to move people, so that experiences are measured in emotion rather than distance."
Reimagining employee experience
For BRP, this brand repositioning was not mere words. Developed through a thorough evaluation of what makes the company tick, the brand purpose applied not only to the customer experience (CX), but also to how the employees perceived the brand and the company they work for.
"Not only did we want to humanize our brand," says BRP's Vice President of Human Resources, Global Function and Talent, Isabelle Perrault, "we wanted to make sure we live it inside out."
As well as making a promise to their existing employees, BRP recognized that stellar EX could be a key differentiator for future collaborators, particularly in markets where talent scarcity had been an ongoing challenge.
Choosing Habanero
With a strategic plan initiated with Emilie Gauthier from Tangible Strategy, BRP sought additional support to design and conduct global research.
"We went with Habanero because of the cultural fit," says Isabelle. "They wanted to understand us, and they were always respectful of who we are. Our relationship with them was amazing. We always felt like we were working in partnership."
Creating the EX of the future
For eight months, BRP's team, supported by Habanero consultants Mallory O'Connor and Caterina Sanders, as well as Emilie Gauthier, worked to identify and design the experience BRP wanted to bring about.
To start, the team carried out an intense program of empathetic research around the globe. They led 37 focus groups and 56 interviews in seven countries, interacting with more than 450 employees over two months.
Senior Vice President of Global Human Resources, Anne Le Breton, calls this a "thorough, bottom-up process. They did an amazing job to understand us as an organization. They went around the world, met our people, and they did it in a way that the trust-factor was there. They had the ability to be credible and to quickly build rapport. That's critical."
It was important for BRP to co-design its employee experience with its people for its people. To this end, and acting upon findings from the research, a "hack-a-thon" was organized, bringing together 20 non-management employees from around the globe to tackle EX challenges.
And it was fruitful, producing most of the roadmap ideas. In all, 700 ideas, 50 opportunities and 8 projects were presented to a panel of senior executives. The roadmap gives the organization a clear line-of-sight on EX projects for the next three years, and will turn BRP's EX vision into a reality.
Employee experiences that drive the organization forward
"Habanero were instrumental in putting this huge puzzle together, resulting in a great X-ray of who we are and where we want to go," Anne comments. Since then, both Isabelle and Anne have noticed that day-to-day conversations around EX have shifted, and there's a visible appetite and buy-in across the organization to move forward in BRP's EX journey.
"Habanero had an ability to be rigorous and agile while wanting so much to understand who we were. This was not a surface exercise. And the output they delivered was a wow," Anne concluded.
