Welser Profile

About Welser Profile 

Welser Profile is a family-owned business specializing in steelworking for over eleven generations. Founded in 1664, the company started out as a pan forge.  

At the end of the First World War, the construction of a stamping shop and the switch from traditional water power to turbine drive heralded a new era for the company. The production of roll-formed profiles began in 1960. This set the course for success.

Today, Welser Profile is globally recognized as the specialist in the development and production of steel profiles.

Key figures:

• 2,400 employees
• 5 production sites in Austria, Germany and the United States
• 11 sales offices across Europe
• 24,500 cross-sections designed and produced

Purpose: Passionate people create opportunities for generations

Website: https://www.welser.com/

Context 

Five years ago, silos were a common challenge at Welser Profile. Each department operated with its own objectives, leading to a lack of alignment and agility, which hindered the company’s ability to adapt quickly to market changes. 

In 2018, Welser Profile embarked on an ambitious project: reinventing its corporate culture. The goal? To foster trust, enhance collaboration, and empower teams, while uniting everyone around a shared purpose.

As Karl Teufl, who has been with the company for 30 years, explains: "We wanted to develop a more agile mindset and align teams around common objectives. So, we started by defining our purpose to lay the foundation for our organizational transformation."

In search of a method to structure this change, Welser Profile adopted a hybrid model inspired by Holacracy. This approach proved to be the ideal solution for enhancing agility and team autonomy. To support this transition and embed the new system, the company chose Talkspirit’s solutions.

Challenges

• Organizational silos: Departments operated independently with their own goals, limiting global alignment and cross-team collaboration.
• Lack of agility: The absence of coordination hindered the company’s ability to adapt quickly in a constantly evolving environment.
• No shared purpose: Teams lacked a common framework to guide their actions and align efforts toward collective goals.
• Operational constraints: As a production company, Welser Profile faced unique challenges, such as running production lines 24/7, which are not fully compatible with traditional Holacracy methodologies.

Why Talkspirit

Welser Profile chose Talkspirit for several compelling reasons: 

• User-friendly and adaptable: Talkspirit’s intuitive interface makes it easy to implement and adjust governance structures as needed.
• All-in-one platform: Talkspirit combines essential collaboration and governance tools in a single solution. Its flexibility supports multiple methodologies, including Holacracy, making it ideal for hybrid organizational models.
• Exceptional support:The Talkspirit team is highly responsive, listening closely to client needs and suggestions to ensure the platform evolves with their expectations.

Implementation Process

• Pilot test: The rollout began in 2022 with a one-year pilot in the Finance department.
• Gradual roll-out: Following the pilot’s success, the platform was progressively extended to other departments. Currently, 800 employees use Talkspirit, with the goal of granting read-only access to all 2,000+ employees.
• Hybrid approach: The company developed its own model—the "Welser Organizational System"—which combines Holacracy principles with traditional structures to meet specific needs.
• Mindset shift: The cultural shift was initiated by leadership and managers, a key step in driving team adoption and easing the transition.
• Employee support: A dedicated "Talkspirit Guru" role and a knowledge base (with tutorials and FAQs) were established to enable continuous self-training.

Key Features Used

On a day-to-day basis, the company mainly uses the following features: 

• Dynamic organization chart: Enables clear visualization and updates of roles, ensuring a transparent distribution of responsibilities.
• Meetings: Facilitates synchronization between different teams.

Welser Profile also plans to implement the Projects module to centralize task management and the OKR module to align objectives across teams.

Benefits

The cultural transformation initiated by Welser Profile has led to numerous benefits:

• Objective alignment: All teams now work toward a shared purpose and unified goal, enhancing collaboration and cohesion.
• Trust and collaboration: Departments work together to solve customer challenges, fostering mutual trust.
• Empowerment: Role-based structures have increased employee responsibility, making them feel more autonomous in their work.
• Proactive initiatives: Employees across teams actively propose ideas to evolve their roles, promoting a positive dynamic within the organization.
• Talent utilization: Employees can take on multiple roles based on their skills rather than being confined by job descriptions. They can also evolve their roles flexibly—an essential asset in today’s VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) world.

In short, this transformation has enabled Welser Profile to build a more agile, collaborative and future-focused organization.

For more details about Talkspirit’s implementation at Welser Profile, check out this article.