Doing an organisation redesign sounds complicated anytime. Doing it during a pandemic sounds crazy. Yet, thanks to the brilliant minds and passionate hearts of our Leadership Team, HR and the rest of our colleagues we did it succesfully, managing to end the year with positive business and organisation KPIs.
In January 2020, Avon officialy became part of Natura&Co family and this process echoed in our organisational design. Our global strategy focused on turnaround, streamlining the organisation and preparing it for being more agile in the future. A key step was merging two separate clusters into one, ending up with a team of 11 markets (both UE and outside), 2 branches, 1 IT hub, 1200 employees and $200mil turnover (with Romania being a top 10 global market and bringing 47% contribution in SE results). The aim of the merge was to set up our Southern Europe (SE) organisation based on solid principles to support our business turnaround and to encourage a culture of empowerment, co-creation and customer-centricity. During the entire process we used only our internal resources and focused on creating smarter ways of working with minimum disruption during the peak of the pandemic.
When you take care of such a purpose driven lovebrand like Avon, one that has as main mission to improve other ones lives, HR is not just a pillar to build organisational structures, but a brand ambassador and a purpose advocate focused on cultivating the spirit of a powerful community.