Case Study: The Culture Mapping Tool
Defining the culture of the UK’s largest mutual life and pensions company...
At a glance...
The Client: One of the largest life insurance and pensions organisation
The Challenge: To map the company’s current culture and enable a benchmark to be set for the future desired culture
The Solution: The Culture Mapping Tool, an easy-to-complete online survey, accessible across devices. Previously validated, it provides reliable metric results in an engaging way.
Transforming Knowledge to Practice: The Culture Mapping survey was developed through leading academic research and has been used across industries and sizes of organisations, providing valuable insights to align strategic goals and improve performance.
Interested in the Culture Mapping Tool? Contact us here!
Overview
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One of UK's largest life insurance and pensions organisation - wanted an impartial assessment of their risk and business performance culture.
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Located throughout the UK with nearly 3,000 employees, over 5 million customers and half a million members.
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With recent expansion and a continued focus on keeping the customer at the heart of their business, the client wanted to ensure that their culture reflected the long established values that have enabled them to maintain a respected position in their industry.
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Systemic Consult provided the client with a risk and business performance culture profile. The organisation's current culture was assessed and mapped through an online survey and a benchmark was identified for their desired future culture.
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The process took just over a month and validated results of independent work on culture, carried out by organisational development specialist over a period of 18 months.
The Challenge
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The client understands the importance of being a reliable partner to their customers and members. They believe that maintaining an appropriate culture lies at the heart of ensuring they uphold the ethics and values that have seen them sustain a steady and respected presence in the market place for over 150 years.
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To be able to do this, they are embarking on a comprehensive culture review. Part of this review requires gaining a more complete understanding of the company’s current culture and a quantitative measure of their culture was essential.
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The organisational development team had been focusing on researching and analysing the company culture, during a 18-month period prior to the Culture Mapping Tool deployment.
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Their preferred solution to achieve this was a pragmatic and accessible approach that would enable them to, firstly, understand their current culture and to, secondly, determine the most appropriate culture for the future.
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As with other organisations, the client's senior leadership team are fully focused on delivering outcomes. The preferred solution needed to be time efficient and easy to engage with.
The Solution
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In response, Systemic launched the Culture Mapping Tool, in the form of a 15 minute online culture survey that went beyond the standard format used by most consultancies. The survey enabled the client to target specific key operating business activities and could be viewed on a PC, tablet or smartphone making it easy and convenient to complete.
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The tool’s flexibility allows room for customisation and its functionality lies on grounded research by distinguished academics. The statements within the survey have already been validated and every time a new statement is introduced it is first pre-piloted on a test sample of a similar population.
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There was observed a high level of engagement with the survey (over 65%) and a much richer source of information through which to understand the company’s current culture and desired future culture. The added benefit of acquiring this information was in meeting conduct risk requirements of the Financial Conduct Authority.
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The results were consistent with the 18-month qualitative research which had already been carried out independently by the organisation and metrics were provided, demonstrating the tool’s internal validity.
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The firm is now taking the information from the survey to use in workshops to build further understanding among their leadership team throughout their function and business areas.
Systemic Consult on the Solution
“Our tool is designed to provide insights across the organisation or on a specific department. Culture development efforts can be targeted where needed, through a gap analysis. It helps reduce management initiative fatigue and focus on performance improvement.”
Why it is important that companies measure their culture and how we do it. Click here!