You are Mariana Teixeira, General Manager of Lusitânia Logística in Porto. Your two largest clients have tied €30M of new business to a shift system and an automation line that must be running by 30 September, seven months away, and your workforce no longer believes what leadership says. Before you announce anything, you must decide which part of their trust is most damaged.
The situation
Lusitânia is a Portuguese logistics operator with six sites: warehousing and last-mile delivery for retail and e-commerce clients. It turns over €240M at a 6% EBIT margin, €14.4M a year, thin even for logistics. It employs 2,600 people, about 1,900 of them in warehouse and driving roles. Four sites are unionised and the works council has real leverage: a walkout in peak season would breach the service agreements that the two big clients, 40% of revenue, are already watching.
The change touches about 180 roles. So far only 20% of teams have moved onto the new shift system. The trust-in-leadership index, a regular 0–100 staff survey, stands at 38; the company's own history treats about 65 as healthy. The works council's strike ballot is already described internally as live.
Eight months ago, the previous management announced a profit-share scheme and then quietly cancelled it, after a botched warehouse-system migration ate the year's profit. You were running operations at the time; you did not make that promise, but you now sit in the chair it emptied. Three phrases keep coming up in the survey: "management says one thing and does another", "to them we're a cost" and "they'll do to the automation what they did to the system". Your own bonus, like every senior manager's, depends on landing it on time.