Freshening up epharma’s organizational design
Author: Maria Alice Jovinski
Unfixing epharma is a grand experiment designed to increase teams' sense of belonging and ownership and offer more autonomy.
At epharma they act by leading through movement, thriving through change.
Who is epharma?
epharma is one of the leading health benefits management platforms in Brazil. The company founded 24 years ago, acts as a link, uniting the technology and health ecosystems and creating intelligent connections between the primary health actors: pharmaceutical industries, HR managers, pharmacies and drugstores, health operators, brokers, health techs, and private companies from different segments.
A pioneer in launching the Medication Benefits Plan (PBM) in Brazil in 1999, it has more than 40,000 pharmacies, 2,000 accredited clinics, and diagnostic laboratories in more than 3,000 municipalities nationwide. This plan benefits more than 33 million people and will generate savings of over R$2 billion in 2023.
The company received the Great Place to Work (GPTW), GPTW Woman seals, and ISO4001 recertification and has a transparent agenda of ESG pillars where the goal is to redefine the meaning of success, oxygenating connections for a better world.
Reasons for change – Nothing changes if nothing changes
To better understand the starting point of the need for change, I must explain that I am an HR professional, and my role at epharma is with the employee experience. I use agility and technology as support tools in this mission. And here, HR is called PeopleX.
Now let's go!
epharma's journey with the unFIX Model began in December 2022, marked by the search for a restructuring of the PeopleX area, an area that, in addition to the employee experience, is responsible for Internal Communication, Employer Brand, Intrapreneurship, ESG, and People OPS (this formed by the Talent Acquisition, Performance, Compensation, and Benefits processes).
As a result of this restructuring, ESG, which had project characteristics until then, became a value stream. The discovery and implementation of the unFIX forum standard represented a milestone in this transformation, inspiring the creation of a Forum-based structure for Employer Branding that aligned more with the company's interdepartmental needs.
Check out our PeopleX base:
a base with an employee branding forum
This Employer Branding Forum was motivated by the need to more effectively integrate the PeopleX and Marketing functions, enabling co-creation through the proximity of the areas.
We strengthen the relationship between members.
We design our employee value proposition (EVP)
We created and structured the EVP tagline and manifesto
We structure the visual identity
We meaningfully educate talent on who epharma is
We increased the number of hits on the career page
We ran a campaign to humanize the brand, creating an image bank with our employees
We increased the number of reviews from former employees on Glassdoor
We expanded our career rating on Glassdoor
We increased applications by 160%, even with 12% fewer vacancies in 2023 than last year.
According to McKinsey & Company, people need more dynamic work models, and HR is a fundamental pillar in an organization's agile transformation. To help the organization become more flexible and adaptable, it must look at three pillars:
Adopting new organizational models: agile, self-managed teams focused on deliveries.
Agile people management artifacts: career plans, performance management, and training development
Lead by example: moving to agile groups where individuals are assigned priority tasks. It demonstrates to employees that HR is committed to agile transformation.
These pillars drove epharma's PeopleX actions in 2023, and they strengthened further when Jurgen Appelo taught them about the unFIX model in a workshop in Brazil.
In addition to the event, an inflection point was the question about the performance evaluation of quality and software development professionals (who evaluates who, what are the weights), which we understand that one of the root causes of this issue was the organizational design itself.
Implementation and Challenges
Knowing this context, we began discussions with senior management in August about how expanding unFIX structure standards would support their teams.
According to Klaus Leopold, the only agile team you need at the start of an agile transformation or change initiative is a top management agile team. Everything else comes from here, led by example. And in this sense, senior management offered full support for this transformation, which is still happening.
To support the adoption of the unFIX model, we identified the target audience impacted by the adoption as follows:
1. Scrum masters (SM)
2. Product professionals (PO/PM)
3. Project team (developers, quality, and technical leader)
4. Tech leaders working in forums (development and quality)
5. Business leaders (while we applied the structure standards, we had a branch of this group, considering the tribes with and without SM activity)
Considering an adoption curve, except for the new tech leadership who had already seen the model, the other employees had never heard of it. Considering this scenario, we scheduled meetings with each group, bringing an educational approach to the model's principles and initial structure designs for discussion and refinement.
People urged for changes. A copied framework didn't work, and partially using the Spotify model was not the answer. We found people in doubt regarding their allocation in the company and the structure standards. In addition to offering a home to employees, offering a home allowed us to model adaptable structures for each value stream, meeting the need for delivery there.
We discussed the definition of roles (supported by the 16 roles already mapped by the model), responsibilities, and the importance of cultivating people's familiarity with known terms in this transformation. With this, the bases were called tribes, crews were called teams, and the roles 'Captain' and 'Chief' were adapted to 'team leader' and 'tribe leader,' respectively.
As mentioned, a particularly notable challenge faced was the position of software development and quality professionals within the organizational structure, highlighting the performance evaluation process. Although formally linked to technology, these professionals worked effectively in business areas. This duality generated a need for more clarity in identifying teams, making it difficult for employees to feel like they were an integral part of a specific team.
This situation highlighted the need for a more defined and transparent structure where each team member could clearly understand their role and contribution within the organization. The solution was for professionals to be part of the base of the business areas because their home is there. Still, they find a common domain in the technology area to evolve technically through Forums.
In November, coinciding with the budget meetings, there was an intensive dialogue with those responsible for the Tribes and Teams, supported by the new technology leadership (CTO). This step was crucial to ensure the transition to the latest model was strategic, practical, and applicable to the company's day-to-day operations.
Here, we also identify how the unFIX model supports the actual exercise of roles. Since we are in Brazil and there is strong labor legislation, the attachment to positions is very high. With the structure standards, we arrive at tribal leaders represented by Product Managers, Coordinators, Managers, Heads, and Directors without a hierarchical link.
The company-wide launch took place in the first week of December 2023, with an evident approach to experimentation; after all, we still need all the answers. The transition has gained more strength in the first quarter of 2024, marked by adopting new responsibilities and intensive training.
This period is crucial for aligning with leadership changes, particularly in technology, where innovations and adjustments to the unFIX model generated the most significant impact.
Integrating these new practices and structures requires a careful approach, ensuring everyone involved absorbs and implements the change effectively.
Results and Learning
During this transformation, we mapped 64 distinct value streams, organized into 18 Bases, distributed across 5 Domains, and synthesized in 1 Congress—epharma.
Strategic restrictions, the North Stars, are aligned in the governance domain. Budgetary restrictions and people management are aligned in the base governance.
The organization as an unFIX congress with 18 bases, distributed across 5 domains
This restructuring process impacted the organization, completely transforming its organizational structure. It allowed us to see the behavior of the employees' adoption curve in real time, each with its own assimilation time.
These processes now open up new opportunities to significantly reflect levels of business agility, as well as tools, technologies, and people to support 2024, such as a time tracker process that generates more value and engagement in project management, optimizing efficiency when identifying excessive time-consuming tasks, real-time monitoring for agile schedule adjustments, effective resource allocation based on accurate time spent data, informed decisions about budgets and management strategies as well as the development of those in the team leadership role, segmented internal communication, townhall tech promoted by the new tech leadership.
The main learnings begin now, with the experiment in action and expansion to patterns that go beyond the structure. For example, metrics and measures of the aspects of goal-setting patterns to measure the progress of our narratives, commitments, and tasks (NCT).
These learnings mark a significant turning point for epharma. They demonstrate the company's success in adopting and adapting a new organizational model to its specific needs, leveraging growth and efficiency in its operations.
