Franc Verhage
Ruth Oortgiesen

The Kramp Way was first conceived in 2011. It shows who we are and where we came from, where we’re going and how we’ll get there. Franc Verhage, Director Corporate Development, and Ruth Oortgiesen, Manager Internal Communications, discuss a relaunch of our guiding document.

“In 2020, we launched Strategy 2025, and while we were planning,” begins Franc, “we saw we needed to revise some of our practices in order to realise our ambitions. We decided to formalise our purpose, review our values and set out the principles associated with them. These were really refinements, as we do so many things right.” 

“We created strategic principles to ensure our decision-making leads us towards our ambitions.” 

Identifying areas for improvement

“But we could improve in some ways,” says Ruth. “Giving constructive feedback, for example. Our entrepreneurial nature means we start a lot of things, but we don’t always focus on finishing them. We now want to balance our customer priorities with our own priorities, like partners do. So, we created strategic principles to ensure our decision-making leads us towards our ambitions, and refreshed our values to Collaboration, Care and Ownership.” 

“To make the principles really tangible, we made a checklist; follow those five principles when pursuing new ideas or a new direction and if you meet them, you’re doing something that supports our strategy and ambition,” explains Franc. 

Kramp Way Festivals

Ruth takes up the story: “In January 2022 we introduced the new principles and values to our managers. For the next few months, we supported them to make sure they could successfully introduce them to their teams. In May, we launched them across the organisation, culminating in the Kramp Way Festival in September. To continue to embed the changes into our daily ways of working, value indicators are now part of our performance cycle, and we will hold three mini-festivals every year."

“The Kramp Way is now summarised in a one-page message house, giving a comprehensive overview of what Kramp stands for,” concludes Franc. “It takes the form of a pyramid, with our purpose at the top, all the way down to our strategy at the base.” “We’ve gone from a 25-page document in 2011 to a single page!” says Ruth. “But each element is then explored in depth on our intranet.” 

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