One of the UK’s leading engineering support services companies
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With the end of government-funded strategic projects and a significant shift into the commercial market, our client needed to reposition themselves to compete effectively in the very challenging private sector.
Insight
There are few times when customer insight can provide more value than during a market reposition. Consequently, we undertook a series of one-to-one interviews with a range of past, present and new customers whom the company was targeting.
As well as reinforcing business relationships, this gave us a solid understanding of how customers perceived our client’s organisational culture, the strengths that could be leveraged to drive customer value, and the areas where improvements in culture and performance needed to be made.
To further ‘get under the skin’ of the company, we completed a BQi culture survey with all staff. This enabled our client to understand how their staff perceived the culture, and to identify cultural strengths and dysfunctions. The survey also highlighted the core leadership competencies required for the culture change to be successful.
At the end of this stage, we collaborated with the project management team to create a plan to communicate and review the feedback with key stakeholders across the organisation.
Action
We ran a series of ‘discovery’ sessions with the senior management team to help them fully appreciate both the customer and staff feedback, and also to understand – in a measurable way – the extent of cultural change necessary to reposition the company effectively in the market place.
We firmly believe that insight enables powerful conversations, and in this case our insight provided the senior management team with the right information to create a one-, three- and five-year ‘cultural vision’.
Having then organised and delivered a series of focus groups, we supported the business in the development of a set of core strategies to achieve the cultural vision. Working with key stakeholders across all levels of the organisation, we subsequently developed a more detailed parallel-path project plan of how these strategies could be implemented.
A final and critical arm of this project was the development of in-house ‘change agents’ to enable the organisation to take the project forward in a sustainable way, without the client being tied to pitchblue.
Results
Having worked in close partnership throughout this project, our client now has:
- A clear quantifiable measure of the current culture in the organisation enabling them to set unambiguous and measurable cultural goals.
- A defined and measurable definition of what the cultural vision needs to be to enable the organisation to be more commercially successful.
- A set of core strategies that need to be implemented for the cultural vision to be realised.
- A parallel-path road-map of ongoing structured activities, broken down by different demographic audiences, to ensure the strategies are achieved.
- A team of internal consultants who can continue the work we have started to help embed the changes and ensure sustainability of the project well into the future.
- An increased bench strength across the management population to better enable them to create, lead and implement the culture transformation.
