ORLANDO – Georgia-Pacific has changed its outlook on how to grow and leverage people in their roles within the company.
In an interview with Beet.TV at the CMO Growth Council, Douwe Bergsma, CMO at Georgia-Pacific, explains the approach to keeping people happy, engaged and challenged within the company, particularly as employee expectations change, by not putting limitations on their functions or capacities. It breaks down like this:
- Don’t try to box employees into defined roles, work with their strengths and competitive advantages to define roles that fit them.
- Don’t define people by their capacity or function but by their individual interests and capacities.
- Give employees a chance to experiment in new roles and grow their skill sets.
This approach, which has been decades in the making but has come to a head as companies rethink what roles need to be in-house vs. outsourced, has led to unexpected performances across the company, as marketers, sales people and creative directors can try their hand in other areas. “We see people flourish tremendously beyond what they think they could do initially,” says Bergsma.
Georgia-Pacific, which manufactures plastic and paper brands like Angel Soft and Brawny, is reworking how it considers its workforce in step with changes in the media landscape. More work is being done in house, so more creative directors and media experts are being hired to lead the charge in new areas of advertising, like on retail media platforms including Amazon.
The bigger picture goal for the company’s advertising strategy, and the future it’s preparing for with its workforce, is one that balances bigger-reach channels like TV with specific messaging that gets to the right customers in the right place at the right time.
“I see a world where you have a mix of mass media, then targeted personalized media, all happening at the same time to drive your brands forward,” says Bergsma.
This video is was produced in Orlando at the CMO Growth Council. The series is sponsored by iSpot.tv. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
