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COSUCRA staff, decisions makers of the Belgian company’s direction

1. Organizational Governance

Strategy and organization

Context

Belgian family company created in 1854, COSUCRA is the world leader in vegetable protein production from peas and fibers extracted from chicory. COSUCRA has 250 employees and transforms more than 200 000 tons of agricultural products exported to 45 countries. Based on its expansion, COSUCRA chose to reinvent its internal organization by placing employees at the center of decisions making through implementing collaborative management.

Objectives

  • Involve all of the staff in order to promote taking initiative and creativity
  • To be transparent regarding decided measures and to make information accessible to all
  • Decentralize decision making, more towards the bottom
  • Increase and diversity projects to grow performance
  • Work on a common goal

APPROACH

In 2014, COSUCRA, asked itself how it would manage difficulties more efficiently when it came to the production and distribution of its products in more than 40 countries. 

Thus, in February 2015, under the influence of Frederic Laloux, « Reinventing Organizations », COSUCRA announced its will to give its staff power and decentralize the majority of decisions. 

Many work groups were created as a result in order to :

• Define values that will guide upcoming decisions 

• Redesign a new organization where each member will be the actor of his or her proposal 

Today, in the scope of collaborative management, staff groups have been created, allowing for the adoption of business focused decisions across different markets. 

The goal to date is to abolish the traditional management model in order to pass the microphone to staff for the majority of decisions. 

In terms of the employee satisfaction, COSUCRA envisions integrating surveys in the company. 

CONTRIBUTION TO COMPANY PERFORMANCE

  • An empowered company allowed to avoid the decrease in revenue for COSUCRA
  • The proposition to change working hours allowed to increase productivity by 5% in the work context.  (http://idsolution-blog.com/cosucra_forumouvert/) 

Benefits

  • The cause and effect between collaborative management and decisions/objectives of the company : decisions made by the departments of higher lever to those awaited by Management.
  • Employee participation and involvement beyond the limit of their work: the “low-level” categories (workers and assistants) reveals their competencies
  • The COMEX has to have the authorization from the division in order to participate in their meetings
  • Employees trained in sociocracy on demand in order to have a true leader roles during meetings
  • The integration was difficult because there was a lot of mental differences that displayed an unwillingness for this type of management.
Workforce
250 collaborateurs
Turnover
85 000 000 €
Country
France

COSUCRA

1, Rue de la Sucrerie
7740 WARCOING

www.cosucra.com/

Mise à jour le 29/08/2017

Creative Commons Attribution This work by Réseau Alliances – World Forum Lille is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.