DAIMLER TRUCKS TT/S

BUILDING A
GLOBAL CULTURE

NAVIGATING DYNAMIC CHANGE WITH AN INTERNATIONAL TEAM

Daimler Trucks TT/S is the Software and Engineering hub for all of Daimler Trucks’ brands worldwide. Until recently though, this was not the case, with a wide-ranging lineup of brands such as Fuso (Japan), Mercedes (Europe), Freightliner (North America) and more, often working independently of each other, with different cultures and different ways of doing business. Moving to a global collaboration model and unifying those departments required a whole new take on how things get done at Daimler Truck.

Challenge:

Bring harmony and cohesion to Daimler TT/S departments from Japan, the United States, Germany, Turkey, and India. And build a healthy, unified company culture that elevates the company and its teams and helps them produce the best software and electronic features on the market.

Solution:

We began with a rigorous discovery and strategy process. We embedded ourselves with the leaders of each region so that we could learn who their employees are as people, what motivates them, and what strategies would foster better collaboration throughout the global team.

Next, we developed the TT/S brand and the ethos behind it. We eschewed the geeky engineering stereotypes and highlighted how their innovations are changing the world. Our creative design team built a logo and visual identity for TT/S that integrated images of their products with binary coding to use in their marketing collateral. This created a distinct and innovative look for the brand that stayed true to the roots of the company. This branding was distilled into an asset library that TT/S uses for creating communication pieces and apparel that bolsters team spirit.

With that foundation in place, we launched a year-long communications campaign to Inform, Inspire, and Celebrate. This initiative began by creating a Culture Team that included joyful team members and representatives from each Daimler region to develop messaging that would be relevant across borders and resonate with the employees of the organization.

Our initial research revealed that many employees within felt uncertainty about changes at the company and yearned for transparency from leadership. We created TT/S Magazine to address these concerns and build trust between employees and TT/S executives. The monthly magazine includes leadership updates, industry news, employee celebration, culture spotlights from each region, and deep dives on key topics such as TT/S guiding principles.

In addition to the magazine, our content strategy also addressed the need for multiple channels to meet their people in a way that works best for them. Different time zones and busy schedules called for content that could be digested quickly, and to achieve this we employed current social media trends, dynamic motion graphics and comic relief to engage readers on drier topics. We also found a fresh way for TT/S to use video content in their messaging. To increase video engagement, we encouraged leaders to deliver clear updates about the company, as well as show sincere appreciation for their team.

The final facet of our strategy was to create employee-centered content on the TT/S internal intranet platform (DAISI), email, LinkedIn, and Instagram. We also developed sounding boards and other metrics to enable us to react in real-time to ongoing needs and keep the content relevant to their ultimate goal: a globally collaborative team.

Results:

Our partnership with Daimler TT/S was renewed for another year and our work of moving their culture in a positive direction continues. So far, we have seen amazing results for a first-year program with rapidly increasing engagement, stronger trust and transparency between leadership and employees, and higher collaboration across global sub-teams. Going into year two, we are already yielding exceptional results which we will populate here as we progress through the year.