Sombroek has been present at more than thirty TMA Assessments with employees. He conducts the interviews together with his assistant Annemieke Boer and the manager of the employee concerned. ‘It’s a hell of a job. It takes up a huge amount of time, but I’m happy to spend that time. I want to show that the management regards this as important. Moreover, this way I pick up a lot of signals from the company that are very useful. For example, I get an insight into the need for courses and training.
The fact is that all of the staff are doing a TMA Assessment as part of a larger project. Sombroek has set himself the task of making the sales organization of the well-known roof windows more customer-friendly. “When I came here seven years ago, I found an inwardly oriented, arrogant organization, which was managed in a very top-down manner’, recalls the director. The company cannot allow this way of thinking to continue because it is an authoritative market leader. At least eight out of every ten roof windows come from the factories of the Danish-based VELUX Company. Sombroek decided to change this culture step-by-step.
He had to break through the island culture and the inward orientation. Sombroek had a free hand in how he did that. We are free to define our personnel policy,’ comments the director.
But we must stick to the values that the Danish founder Rasmussen stipulated back in the sixties.’