Case Studies

Case Studies

UK Insurance

Perspective of Values & Change Challenges

  • A major UK insurance wanted to embed a strong culture of people feeling empowered, trustful, and focused on achievement, and requested help to measure their culture, and draw out the issues that were most important to employees for three reasons:

    • Culture surveys were providing superficial observations and management felt they did not have a grasp of how the culture was experienced.

    • Focus groups were patchily attended and only revealed anecdotes.

    • They had been through a lot of change, and the organisation wanted to know how this had impacted the culture and performance of staff.

  • Over 70,000 staff comments about their culture, together with comments from Glassdoor (one of the largest job and recruitment sites), submitted by past and present employees were gathered and analysed.

    Analysis confirmed:

    • employees were striving to achieve targets however systemic barriers to achievement were in place,

    • These barriers were leading to frustration and creating conduct risk,

    • Unfamiliar jargon, new goals, and changed management structures were issues,

    • senior executives, were not fully aware of how recent changes had impacted employees, and their actions to drive improvements paradoxically worked against an achievement culture.

  • Change and leadership issues need to be addressed, before a strong culture of empowerment, trust, and achievement could be attained.

    A roadmap for improving the culture based on how it was actually experienced, rather than high - level values that were not embedded in the day-to-day was implemented. In particular, an obstacle reporting and resolution system, requiring action to be taken to remove local and systemic barriers to achievement, was implemented across the organisation.

Global Pharmaceutical

Speaking Up & Achievement Challenges

  • A major global pharmaceutical company wanted to understand what its culture looked like from the ground, and to explore barriers to performance after a transformational change.

    They had historically collected comments from employees via culture surveys. Whilst the survey data was often analysed, the analysis and observations provided were not especially meaningful, and did not relate to the new direction of the company.

    The company was interested in understanding cultural patterns

    • In different functions,

    • In parts of the organisation;

    • whether the aspired values of the organisation were bedding in, and;

    • the impact recent changes in workplace practices

  • Over 500,000 staff comments, from operations around the world, about the which enabled the executive to take targeted action The most important finding was issues in the culture around speaking up.

    •In some countries and functions, people reported very positively on their ability to speak-up about problems and ideas, and that these were taken seriously.

    • In other locations however, employees reported that whilst they could speak-up, there times their input never went anywhere.

  • The full analysis made the ‘on the ground’ experience of employees related to speaking up transparent:

    • There was a tendency to not take external input seriously (i.e. between teams), when transforming the business and leveraging voice of employees;

    • A tendency of the organisation to communicate outwards frequently, but not receive messages.

    Understanding that the ability for employees to speak up and for problem solving arising from that feedback is critical to organisation sustainability, the organisation’s senior leaders were able to take targeted actions with specificity to address these issues rather than implementing generalised ‘improve communications’ strategies.