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, 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.

  • Gathered and analysed 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.

    Using an artificial intelligence language model, that is based on eight years of behavioural physiological scientific research at the London School of Economics, algorithms helped analyse the culture, from a perspective of the values of the organisation, namely empowerment, trust, and achievement. In addition, we analysed one issue - change - that became more transparent from the data.

    The unique value of our approach was distilling the huge amount of feedback generated in the organisation about the culture, and drawing out the issues that were most important to employees, not recognised by managers, and represented a barrier to change.

  • The data provided both the inside perspective on culture within the organisation (i.e. how it is experienced on the ground), and an insight on problems and issues that people wanted to raise outside of the corporate environment (e.g., due to anonymity). Given the back drop of several major change upheavals, both in terms of leadership and technological systems, analysis confirmed:

    • People to feel somewhat uncertain and adrift: on a day - to -day basis;

    • Employees were facing challenges with new IT systems; and

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

    It was clearly apparent to senior executives, they were not fully aware of how recent changes had impacted employees, especially

    at the operational level and this in turn, undermined employees perceptions of the culture, with cynicism creeping in, due to executives seemingly being out of touch.

    Going forward, change and leadership issues need to be addressed, before a strong culture of empowerment, trust, and achievement could be attained.

    • Managers focused on the key change issues that employees were experiencing;

    • Improved upward communication to leadership, so that executives were better in-tune with the organisation, and

    • Mapped out 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.

Global Pharmaceutical

Speaking Up & Achievement Challenges

  • A major global pharmaceutical company wanted to understand its culture after a transformational change. Over many years they had collected comments from staff and employees, via the traditional approach of culture staff surveys.

    Whilst the survey data was often analysed, observations were not especially meaningful, and did not relate to the new direction of the company. The organisation wanted to examine what it’s culture looked like from the ground, and to explore barriers to performance

  • Gathered and analysed over 500,000 staff comments, from operations around the world, about the culture.

    Using an artificial intelligence language model, that is based on eight years of behavioural physiological scientific research at the London School of Economics, the algorithms helped to analyse the culture:

    • In different functions, including and;

    • In parts of the organisation;

    • Explored the cohesiveness and issues that staff were raising;

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

    • Impact recent changes in workplace practices (e.g., hybrid).

  • Analysis provided transparency of problems in the culture, in particular locations around speaking-up, and cultural barriers that needed to be overcome, in order for the organization to improve performance. Analysis confirmed a strong culture, however this varied by location, particularly around topics:

    •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.

    Analysis of the internal data help explore why:

    • 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.

    • The organisation wanted to embed a culture of people being achievement-oriented. Whilst employees supported the idea of being empowered to achieve, employees were challenged by this, as analysis confirmed a lot of rules, procedures, administration, barriers, and systems for getting things done.

    • Analysis revealed management to be somewhat detached, especially as questionnaires and statements on culture did not touch on this issue.