Overview
A leading European Insurtech subsidiary of a global insurance group had once been a pioneer in its space. But as digitalization accelerated, the business was losing momentum in bringing new products to market. Competition for top talent in its home city was also intensifying, making it increasingly difficult to attract and retain the best people.
Our approach
We kicked off our tried-and-tested Insight, Design, Embed process with a Culture Assessment, which included a culture survey, 121s with the executive team, and focus groups in the home city and around the world.
This identified a fundamental mindset challenge: people were focusing more on maximising one historically successful product, rather than innovating and developing new products to solve tomorrow’s problems.
The existing culture needed to be refocused on greater levels of innovation and collaboration, whilst also building on strengths which had enabled the successes to date, all in a way that ensured people bought into them and provided refreshed expectations for everyone.
A new company Purpose, Vision and Culture Principles were developed through a facilitated approach with a global, cross-functional Culture Design Group (CDG). This group shaped the core essence of the future culture required to align everyone and provide clear guidance on the way the entire business needed to operate to be successful in fulfilling the strategic aims. Once drafted the CDG socialised their work with their peers to gather feedback to ensure the intent and language of the final version resonated with the majority of people.
Once the new Purpose, Vision and Culture Principles had been defined, people wanted to know how everyone was going to be held accountable to them, including being really clear in what was expected in day to day behaviours. In response, we developed a Behaviour Competency Framework, again using the CDG to get initial input and feedback from around the organisation before finalising them. This behaviours framework was then used by the HR team to implement changes to the end to end employee lifecycle to ensure they were recruiting, performance managing, developing and engaging people in line with the refreshed culture and behaviours.
An all company event was used to launch the refreshed culture. It was design and hosted internally with the guidance and support from one of our internal communications and engagement specialists using our Culture Copilot™ service.
The embedding phase included supporting the leadership team to build confidence and capability in leading culture change, ensuring that the newly defined innovation culture would be effectively brought to life.
The first workshop, Leading Culture Change, was packed with interactive sessions and fruitful discussions that created a shared sense of understanding what culture means and the role leaders play in enabling culture change. The second, Culture & Leadership allowed them to have reflective conversations about what it looks and feels like when we’re leading at our best, and how to model the culture we want to see.
Line Managers were trained as facilitators and guided to take their teams through our CulturEmbed™ approach. As a result, all employees across the organisation were encouraged and enabled to dive into the culture, explore what the culture principles meant for them, agree how through living the culture principles and behaviours day to day, they could improve things for themselves and in working with other teams. Once implemented, the action plans they developed during the process, and the following regular reviews, helped in truly embedding the culture principles in a meaningful way across the whole organisation, as part of the way they operate and quickly becoming part of business as usual. Expert culture change support was provided to Managers on an ‘as needed’ basis through our Culture Copilot™ service.
With the new innovation culture launched, and the leadership team empowered to support the company to fully adopt the new Purpose, Vision and Culture Principles, all that’s left is to put in place processes to measure the impact of this work. By constantly monitoring and evolving their culture, the business will once again be equipped to develop innovative products and reclaim their trailblazing reputation.
What the clients said
How to get started
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