Communication Leads
to Transformation

Successful change needs a team that works well together. The corporate culture needs to be right. Everyone needs to be aware of their roles – and particularly
the path they are embarking on together. For this to succeed, H&R has numerous ideas up its sleeve.

Although change is nothing special in our company, the path that we have found ourselves on in recent years is leading our
H&R Group into a completely new era. We have taken the first step with the conversion of our re-finery production – away from classic lubricant joint production toward the application-specific production of specialty products. This enables us to create a higher-quality portfolio of products that are tailored to our customers’ requirements. We have already initiated the second step of replacing fossil feedstock with sustainable alternatives by producing our own hydrogen, and we are currently expanding this with the power-to-liquid system for the production of synthesized e-fuels and waxes.
In theory, such a conversion sounds simple. But in practice, it is highly complex. The processes that need to be changed involve multi-layered exper-tise, countless years of experience and, above all, well-rehearsed team effort. We need to coordinate with each other in the Group in a new way – not only in the processes themselves, but also in the upstream and downstream stages.

Transformation team – driver and point of contact

For the implementation of the first stage, we have already significantly intensified communica-tion within our Group – management staff events serve to keep management teams informed, and workforce and company meetings update our employees. We also produce newsletters to keep our teams at the sites routinely updated about our plans and company developments.
That is not sufficient for our second, more fundamental stage. From this spring, we will have a transformation team, which, under the leadership of an experienced manager, will explicitly ensure that we can successfully complete the transition to-ward our sustainability goals. The team will launch transformation-related projects, manage/monitor appropriate processes and be a fixed point of con-tact for all of the units in the Group.
Our managers will take on a very important role in keeping everyone informed about the trans-formation. The commercial and technical direc-tors and those in charge of different areas of the company, such as engineering, innovative process technologies and raw materials purchasing will be responsible for disseminating information throughout the organization. The advantage here is that, as managers, they know the form in which the transformation efforts affect their areas of re-sponsibility. And, as managers, they can pass on the information associated with this clearly and initiate the required processes in a precise manner.

Taking time for discussion

Providing information is good. Talking to one an-other is better. In line with this philosophy, we invited staff from both of our production sites to a hybrid dialogue event this February. The focus of the professionally supported round of interviews was an exchange of information on our corporate development topics. The employees took the op-portunity to ask questions or make contributions. Anyone who was not able to follow the event live, which was streamed on YouTube, has the opportu-nity to watch the recording at any time on the intranet. This was well-received. We are planning to arrange additional discussion events with various participants over the course of the year.