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CONSTRUCTION CEMEX I designed and coordinated interviews, workshops, and surveys worldwide, researched thriving culture models, and analyzed and synthesized all collected data to co-create with my teammates and client a people-centric operating system that would resonate with all Cemex's collaborators.

Role
Company
Year
Duration

Res esearcher & Strategist
Cemex
2018
6 months

The original assignment: create an adoption strategy for the new Code of Ethics, Ethos, through a communication campaign designed to engage the global CEMEX community into a new behavioral system—aimed at reducing wrongful behaviors while increasing the level of confidence for issuing complaints.

Context In 2018, beginning the transition towards a second leadership generation, CEMEX faced three major difficulties concerning its corporate culture:

1. Low digital transformation adoption process
Lack of coherence between ETHOS and the diversity program

2. Low rates of talent retention and attraction.

3.CEMEX is a company with over 40,000 collaborators worldwide.
The key challenge stood in comprehending the underlying causes of the setbacks across different cultural and geographic contexts. This would allow us to design and implement a fresh approach to boost internal operation.

A worldwide challenge

For the diagnostic, a research strategy was developed to reach every level of the organization from the executive suite to more than 40,000 collaborators in plants and offices around the world. It was designed to deeply know how culture, gender, age, and geographic factors can affect the engagement of the company's communication with its collaborators.

Through workshops, surveys, ethnographies, and one-on-one interviews —with a 70% participation— the diag nosis highlighted the importance of evolving Cemex into a people-driven company to get pass the emotional and operational barriers.

Who made Cemex

The company attracted 3 types of employee archetypes with complementary strengths and an eagerness to transcend throughout their job. However, few felt the values reflected their aspirations, damaging Cemex's positioning to future candidates.

To make Cemex the leader in talent attraction and retention, we updated the company’s value system. We focused on promoting a sense of belonging and integrity to foster an innovative environment based on continued–learning & adaptability.

The strategy required 3 different approaches:

1 Same word, same meaning

Core values had different interpretations because of cultural context and needed to be reframed to represent all collaborator’s beliefs.

2 Human connection

The new strategy needed to be collaborators-centered to build a better future with and for the Cemex community.

3 All-level involvement

The campaign should appeal to all collaborators, regardless of their position and geographic location.

Building together a better future

A new business model and a strategic platform w designed for expanding its services to 30 million informal Mexican workers along with the B2B insurance market for large-scale employers.Aligning Core Values, Code of Ethics, and Conducts & Success Factors allowed us to build an ideological platform and a new culture evolution project.

We created an internal communication strategy and invited Cadena & Associates to implement the adoption process. The campaign reflected the archetypes’ DNA featuring unique core strengths for collaborators to identify themselves and their co-workers. Also, we designed guidelines for internal courses, visual and graphics resources, and a set of cultural practices, all placed in an implementation roadmap considering key global events to launch and f on the campaign.

In 2019, Forbes magazine, in partnership with Statista, included CEMEX on that year’s list of the “World’s Best-Recognized Businesses;” a ranking was based on “integrity, social conduct, product- and service-quality parameters as well as its participation as employers.”