Redefining Culture to accelerate Performance, Growth and Innovation in a Leading Mortgage Advice brand

A Culture Design Group was created, comprising a mix of MAB’s Senior Leadership members, managers, and staff to fully understand all the issues faced within the business and to be the group who were able to provide insight on the culture today and define the culture required for the future.

Design

A new Mission, Vision and DNA was designed through facilitated exercises with the Design Group – which was named MABology. A supporting strategic narrative was created that the CEO/Founder, leaders, managers and staff could all connect with about the MAB organisational change journey – connecting past, present and future.

A launch and 12-month employee engagement model based on our 4Es of Human Change principle was developed and implemented, including an online Launch Day Live Event.

The DNA (Values) were developed into a set of behaviours which could be used for talent attraction, recruitment, induction, performance management and development. These included the regulatory and ESG expectations to provide a single source of clarity of expectations for everyone, and ensure a conduct culture.

Developing an implementation road map, including identifying the changes required for embedding the DNA into the end to end employee lifecycle.

Trained leaders and managers on the behaviours and how to use them best with their teams, as well as identifying where they were role modelling behaviours and where they need to focus their own improvements.

Embed

Once MABology launched we needed to make sure it was truly embedded into the MAB DNA. We did this by:

• Developing an implementation road map.
• Post launch employee engagement initiatives to get them in a routine and rhythm for ongoing success including Friday Joy, MABfest and MABplause.
• Creating facilitator guides so managers could run MABology workshops with their teams to help individuals and teams understand what MABology meant to them and how they needed to change their ways of working.
• Providing mentoring support to key MAB people to keep momentum and overcome any challenges.
• Establishing key cultural metrics so they can track the change.

Results

• Over 200 employees attended the MABology Launch event
• Over 400 MABplauses since launch
• 78% of people joining Friday Joy – a 15-minute virtual business update every fortnight
• 6 MABstars celebrated at first new-look quarterly people event (MABFest)
• 94% of people feel they fully understand the Mission, Vision and DNA
• Staff are 2.5X more likely to recommend someone to work at MAB
• Staff believe communication has improved by 83%

And that’s not all …

• Mortgage Advice Bureau took ‘Highly Commended’ for the Business Culture Leadership Award with their Head of People and Culture, Claire Smith
• They won Best Medium Organisation for Business Culture, and they were crowned Best Overall, out of all 26 categories
• Culture Consultancy won Business Consultancy of the Year 2022.

Now, isn’t that MAB-nificent?!