Viewpoint of Francis Grass, Executive Vice President, EMEA
How can a performance-driven culture be embedded at all levels of a company? How can it be maintained, nurtured, and sustained? And above all, how can teams be mobilized around this ambition?
This is the challenge addressed by Colas’ IMPACT program, launched with the goal of improving performance by one point by 2027.
Performance should be understood in the broadest sense. It is, of course, financial, aiming to improve our ratios to remain competitive and profitable—a critical lever in highly competitive markets. It is also operational, as it involves implementing measures that reflect the company’s vision and enable it to meet commitments. This requires standardizing processes, having an efficient organization, and placing the right teams in the right roles at the right time. Finally, it concerns our resilience, since in today’s inherently unstable world, we must anticipate, react quickly, and engage our teams under any circumstances.
Setting the Course and Sharing a Common Foundation
I firmly believe that performance isn’t something you can order—it’s something you build every day. That is why I implemented three key measures within my scope.
The first was simplifying our communication by explaining to country management teams our vision, how we intended to deploy it, and the objectives and indicators guiding us. This clarity allowed us to set the course, reinforce guiding principles, and identify priorities.
I wanted to instill a genuine performance culture through shared tools and the exchange of best practices.
I also decided to better structure our operational excellence approach. While this work must consider each country’s context, it takes shape through the rationalization and revision of our operational processes. We constantly ask ourselves how to optimize the quality/cost/time equation—how to do better, simpler, faster, and always at the right price.
The goal is to be more efficient, which led to the creation of an EMEA Operational Excellence department to coordinate and oversee these initiatives. This department helps us consolidate lessons learned and find solutions to continually improve our working methods. It also helps address intercultural challenges at Colas and leverage our full potential.
Promising Results
This roadmap has already produced notable achievements. For example, we have revised our approach to bids, emphasizing dynamic pricing. We now selectively respond to tenders, focusing on optimizing our sales prices. Our approach also varies depending on whether a project is a “Must Have” or a “Nice to Have.”
Another example of operational performance gains is our work in quarries, processing over 300,000 tons of materials annually. By changing methods, automating manufacturing processes, and implementing corrective actions, we eliminated financial losses. Today, these quarries Improved their performance by more than 10%.
Thirdly, portfolio reviews—accounting for differences in performance and ethics across countries—have led to site closures or strategic disengagements where necessary.
Country leaders play a pivotal role in driving daily performance, ensuring action plans are implemented and monitored. They have performance indicators tied to evaluation and compensation.
While there is still room for improvement, the results we see today underscore the effectiveness of our approach and the positive outcomes when everyone moves in the same direction with a shared mindset.
