Overview
A fast-growing business with ambitious plans.
Harworth Group PLC is a leader in land and property regeneration. Managing and owning 14,000 acres across 100 sites in the North of England and the Midlands, Harworth’s team works to create sustainable places where people want to live and work.
Over the last few years Harworth had gone through a period of significant growth, almost doubling the size of their team, and had more ambitious growth targets in their sights. But as they grew, they were finding a cultural disconnect between different teams and groups of employees, and they needed help aligning everyone on the same page.
Moving to ‘One Harworth”.
In order for Harworth to continue growing as planned, they needed to make sure that everyone in the organisation – from the employees who had been with the business from the start to the new recruits who had joined in the last few years – was pulling together as one Harworth.
They needed to define and embed a new set of values and behaviours across all teams, one that:
Our approach
Taking the best of Harworth culture and moving it to the next level.
Our work with Harworth followed our award-winning 3-stage culture change methodology, with the embedding journey currently underway. Here’s how that looked in practice:
A generally positive overview with opportunities to go further.
The first step in the journey towards Harworth’s new culture was understanding the culture they currently had – not only what needed to change, but also what elements were working well.
After reviewing the results of the company’s most recent engagement survey and Knight Index, we set to work speaking to employees from across the entire organisation. These conversations took place in a few different forms:
What emerged from the Insight stage was a mixed perception about the culture, with many strengths of the existing culture uncovered, but with some of these at risk of erosion unless attention was paid to them.
At the end of this phase, we delivered an executive team debrief workshop to concluded on the findings and agree on the strategic imperatives.
Creating new values, behavioural competencies and performance management.
Once we had a detailed and accurate picture of Harworth’s current cultural setting, the next step was to design a way forward that kept hold of what was already working well while addressing the risks and opportunities.
We started out by defining a refreshed vision and set of values, while recognising that Harworth’s core purpose didn’t need to change. With strategic guidance from the senior leadership team, we used the employee forum to dig into the core sentiments of what the business stood for, then developed a new set values. These values were developed by the employee forum with input from executive and senior leadership, and the draft values were socialised with wider group of employees to seek feedback before being finalised.
Once the company’s four refreshed values were concluded, we then used them as the basis for a full behavioural competency framework. This framework was designed to give meaningful guidance on how everyone should behave when performing their roles. This would unlock opportunities for improving talent attraction, recruitment, performance management and development.
A new end-to-end performance management approach, “Enabling Excellence”, was developed which incorporated the behaviour framework. To support this, we developed an introduction to the behavioural framework module for managers and colleagues, that would be used as an integral part of implementing the approach.
We designed and co-delivered a launch event for the company’s new culture. This event helped to set Harworth’s new culture, behaviours and values within the company’s wider narrative, educating and engaging employees on what the culture means to them on a day-to-day basis through immersive activities.
Lastly, we developed a cultural dashboard to help Harworth’s leaders to measure the culture shift against specific people, culture and business metrics, and ran a full culture survey after the launch to assess the progress of the culture journey so far. This strategic culture dashboard is being used to monitor and guide the culture change as part of Business as Usual.
Bring the One Harworth culture fully to life and making it futureproof.
The embedding phase of our work with Harworth continues. This part of the culture project includes:
Whilst the embedding continues, Harworth is already seeing the positive results of their culture change work. With everyone aligned on their growth ambitions, Harworth has since become a FTSE 250 company. Meanwhile, their ENPS score has risen to +49 and based on the latest dashboard indicating there is high ‘consistency’ in adoption of the values in day to day working practices, but still further potential to embed.
98 % say “I am proud to tell people I work for Harworth”, and 97% “I would recommend Harworth to others as a good place to work”. Voluntary staff turnover is at 5.4% ; this is 23 percentage points lower than the Real Estate sector average.
Gender balance has shifted significantly 70:30 to 58:42 in 2024, outperforming the sector average of 72:28, demonstrating the commitment to diversity and inclusion.
On first Investors in People assessment, a GOLD standard was awarded – a brilliant result as <1 in 3 globally accredited organisations achieve Gold status, and most after multiple accreditations not on first assessment.
Overall communication is now more open and personal, and employee involvement has flourished, for example staff input shaped the new head office’s name, road name, and even furniture choices.
What the clients said
How to get started
We help businesses of all shapes, sizes and industries overcome their cultural challenges. To find out more, click the button below and our Co-Founder Jo will directly be in touch.
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