Fielmann Group gives employees clearer vision and drives alignment with Microsoft Viva

The Fielmann Group—a stock-listed family business based in Hamburg, Germany—provides eyewear, contact lenses, hearing aids, and primary eyecare services to 28 million active customers through an omnichannel platform that comprises digital sales channels and more than 1,000 retail stores.

Given its enormous scale, Fielmann has built a remarkable track record of long-term loyalty among both staff and customers. Many of its 23,000 worldwide employees start out as apprentices and stay with the company for years, and those employees are consistently driving customer satisfaction and retention rates of more than 90%. To date, the company has fitted more than 200 million pairs of individual prescription glasses.

What accounts for such fierce loyalty? “Our unwavering commitment to our philosophy 'You are the customer' is at the very heart of our family-owned business and leads to us working tirelessly for our customers as one big team,” answers Catherina Cordes, who manages corporate communications projects and is responsible for the Microsoft 365 platform at Fielmann as communication product owner. “Fielmann embodies the core values of a family-owned business, emphasizing openness, care, and reliability.”

In July 2022, the company’s Organizational Development team was tasked by the Executive Board to launch a new pilot project, implementing a goal-setting process designed to enhance employee alignment while preserving the meaningful customer centricity that is key to the success of the Fielmann Group. The project embraced a well-established objectives and key results (OKR) framework but with a special emphasis on Outcome and Impact rather than OKR methodology. “We call our program ‘Outcome Management,’” says Cordes, “because that’s what we want to manage: outcomes. It’s a subtle shift, but it supports a clearer sense of purpose and enables everyone to understand their contribution to overall progress.”

The Outcome Management pilot is included in nearly every department within Fielmann Group’s head office, as well as within fourteen areas. Total participation comprised approximately 200 employees organized into 30 teams. The company’s Management Board provided the “north star,” articulating strategic goals for the company leading up to 2025.

By the end of 2022, the pilot had proven successful, prompting the Fielmann Group to roll Outcome Management out more broadly. “Now the question was how to proceed with a long-term and scaled solution,” remembers Cordes. The technology platform for the program would become a critical choice, and it needed to be comprehensive. “We had already selected Microsoft 365 E5, Microsoft 365 F3 (with Microsoft 365 F5 Security),” she explains. “By choosing Microsoft, we enabled all of our employees to efficiently communicate, collaborate, and become more productive cross-functionally via a secure, cloud-based platform that meets our comprehensive governance and compliance requirements. Since it was already a well-established environment, adding Microsoft Viva was allowing the Outcome Management rollout to benefit from the structures in place.”

Outcome Management is self-organized by the participants, with initial support from a partner to build skills and structures. To organize its work processes more efficiently, Fielmann sought a unified employee-engagement and goal-management platform for employees to access skilling, find and share information, and drive alignment to team objectives and strategic priorities across the enterprise.

Microsoft Viva brings together the tools and applications needed for communication and feedback, analytics, goals, and learning—all in one unified solution. In Viva Goals, Fielmann found an OKR management solution for setting business goals and aligning teams to the organization’s strategic priorities. “We opted for Viva Goals due to its competitive price point and comprehensive feature set for managing OKRs,” says Cordes. “In addition, ease of use was a fundamental prerequisite for our transition.”

Fielmann converted all of the Outcome Management pilot teams to Viva Goals over a relatively short period, using Microsoft’s online seminars to train employees as Viva Goals coaches. “This training, coupled with organizational development efforts and constant exchange among all involved teams, ensured a smooth transition,” says Cordes. “Establishing Viva Goals experts allowed us to provide the required training for different departments in a very structured and fast pace, allowing us to successfully roll out Viva Goals to all our information workers in the head office in just a few months.”

Cordes says the rollout of Viva Goals across the company was a “big bang” in early 2023. Since then, Fielmann has seen improvements in individual employees’ alignment with strategic goals. “The program has provided much better visibility of all areas involved and simplified, as well as optimized, the planning of our budget and time investments,” says Cordes. “The ability to focus on visible, clear results, easy-to-understand results, and leading indicators creates moments of truth that inform our discussions about what should be done next.”

Most importantly, Fielmann’s increased alignment has not come at the expense of its cultural imperative—the sense of customer centricity that has made the company great. “We place great importance on fostering open connections among our colleagues across functions and departments,” Cordes emphasizes. “Leveraging our Microsoft 365 environment and the Microsoft Viva Suite, our colleagues share knowledge daily, sparking new ideas in collaboration and customer service.”

“Quick and easy access to Viva Goals is paramount for us. Transparency and collaboration fuel constructive feedback [and] quickly reach the right channels, often serving as catalysts for positive change. Each team member contributes daily to our company’s improvement,” says Cordes. Fielmann currently has 1,600 employees licensed to use Viva Goals. The company is in the process of rolling out other Viva modules, including Viva Connections and Viva Learning.

“By licensing all employees with the Microsoft 365 environment and Microsoft Viva, we’ve created a platform where colleagues can exchange information, stay informed, and collaborate seamlessly,” Cordes concludes. “Through tools like Microsoft Teams and Viva Engage, we engage closely with our colleagues in stores, testing and implementing various projects and innovations directly in customer interactions. Their feedback serves as our compass for decision-making and continuous improvement.”

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