CASE STUDY
Operationalizing Culture in a Small Financial Services Firm
The Challenge: Leadership Unaware of Workforce Unhappiness
A small financial services company was growing quickly and realized they needed to bring on an HR consultant to take over their HR function. The HR consultant they hired started her work off with a listening tour to get to know people and find out what they needed, wanted, and loved about working there.
To the leadership team’s dismay, the report out from this listening tour was not good news. In short, people weren’t happy and the leadership team had no idea. All this time, they’d figured the cool workspace by the beach, the generous bonuses, and the “family-first” culture was working. They were so jostled by this news, and being numbers people, they wanted another expert to obtain quantitative data and so the HR consultant referred us in.
The Work: A Survey & Recommendations
We partnered with the client to develop and deliver a short survey. We uncovered the same information the HR consultant’s listening tour did – while statements like, “My team gets along well with each other” were rated with upwards of 90% positivity, the organization itself had much room for improvement. For example:
- 49% of the workforce did not have confidence in the leadership team
- 50% weren’t clear on how their role helps the organization achieve its goals
- 35% felt the departments didn’t communicate well
- 74% were dissatisfied with promotion opportunities (or the lack thereof)
It turns out that despite all of the work on the company culture, the leadership team was missing a key element – they’d failed at communicating the company goals, how each person’s role played into achieving those goals, and how their bonuses were tied to individual and company success. The ad hoc bonuses given out actually created problems due to lack of transparency, and not the motivation it was intended to achieve.
The Outcomes: Operational Improvements
Armed with the data and knowledge that their workforce was craving a future vision and more direction and transparency from leaders; they held strategic planning meetings and determined their key goals and performance indicators. This was published to their workforce, and a communication plan created.
They also implemented a new performance management system that will track individual performance and KPIs as they relate to the organization’s goals so they could clearly communicate about promotions and bonuses and align organizational processes and procedures with the strategy.
Unfortunately, this business is not an anomaly – the organization had spent resources on all sorts of things to make the workplace better but never stopped to ask employees what they needed or wanted in that endeavor. Many companies fail to get culture right because they haven’t assessed what’s working and what’s not, nor have they made culture a part of their annual strategic planning. In this case they hadn’t done any strategic planning at all – the plan was to grow without clarity to the workforce on how.