Electrochaea

Electrochaea specialises in:

1. storing renewable energy
2. displacing fossil gas with renewable methane, and
3. reusing carbon dioxide

Electrochaea’s proprietary process to produce renewable methane at an industrial scale can be used to green the gas grid, continue to green the power grid, and recycle any source of CO₂. Electrochaea has headquarters in Munich with operations in Denmark and the US.

In 2020 Electrochaea secured an investment of €37m leading to a period of significant growth.

Interventions

Electrochaea asked Helix to help with:

• Staff struggling with working from home and feelings of isolation at the beginning of the Covid19 pandemic.
• Developing the senior team to work as a tight unit to facilitate growth.
• Organisational development strategies to structure the company for the future.

Helix assisted in three ways

1. Helix ran Zoom sessions for all staff, helping them with communication and human engagement at the start of lockdown. The sessions were a fun way to focus on well-being and familiarised the organisation with video conferencing as a vital communication tool.
2. A series of workshops for the senior leadership team over Zoom and when Covid travel rules allowed, in person. These sessions focused on defining strategies to:

• Capitalise on the investment – at pace.
• Develop a cohesive team, capable of taking a growing organisation into a demanding period where time is of the essence.
• Developing a leadership ‘philosophy’ and a charter for all leaders to sign up to
• Developing awareness of optimal and suboptimal work and communication patterns, and best options and direct corrective action

3. Ongoing consultancy on structure, recruitment, on-boarding, and people development as the organisation grows.

Outcomes

• Results
  • Established a reliable record of team performance, skills and gaps; a guide for continuing improvement.
  • Identification of leadership team behaviour, skills, and gaps for effective Company leadership.

• Efficiencies
  • Faster and more concise decision-making at senior level.
  • More expedient process for potential new hires.
  • More efficient board meetings.
  • Better and more focused management and team meetings.
• ROI
  • More efficient recruitment spend, resulting in good hires.
  • Improved performance in customer-facing roles.
  • Projects moving at a faster pace.
  • Senior leaders were able to take faster decisions and engage more on critical topics.
  • Improved performance against key goals.
• Non-financial benefits
  • Biggest return is on the emotional level; confidence from success in using Helix’ tools and observations.
  • Lower levels of internal frustration alongside strong personnel growth.
  • Better allocation and assignment of responsibility to more people leading to improved performance.
  • Improved board dynamics.

Helix is truly impressive. They provided an organic and immediately effective engagement for Electrochaea’s management team facing the dual challenges of 50% personnel growth and rapidly evolving markets on two continents, and with an escape from the Covid world uncertain. As a small company built over 7 years by two strong-willed managing directors and a historically intimate management process, Helix held a mirror to our team’s inner workings and guided us to provide a realistic vision of how we would really need to operate to succeed in the future we are striving to create. An insightful process delivering more rapid progress than we imagined. The result is meeting our personnel and market growth goals, hiring the right management talent, handling significantly more challenges with less stress, and delivering clear progress on our commercial goals and team dynamics.  And, remarkably, a holiday and some weekends off for the management team!

Mich Hein, CEO & MD