Our impact

Developing a values-driven culture

Ground up, employee driven values development and localisation leads to new conversations.

The Challenge

We were engaged by a large municipal council to articulate their organisational values and behaviours to provide clarity on what’s expected of each other in working to achieve results. The goal was to be able to describe ‘how we work together’. Our client wanted to create a consistent, meaningful experience for their people across their diverse operations. In parallel, the Council was defining key performance standards.

Our Approach

We partnered with our client to design and roll out an organisation-wide engagement process. Starting with the executive team, we facilitated departmental workshops at each layer of the organisation. Participants completed surveys, so that we were able to gather unique perspectives, and engaged in small-group discussions about the values that are critical to delivering great service. Our rigorous thematic analysis of the extensive data drawn from the workshops and surveys identified four sound, relevant and employee-defined core values. The draft values and behaviours were validated and refined through further conversation (in facilitated, cross-organisational workshops).

To ensure that the values truly become part of the fabric of the Council, all teams worked together, in two-part, action oriented facilitated workshops, to ‘translate’ the organisational values to their work and environment, resulting in team-specific agreements. Managers played a significant part in leading their teams to explore how they would ‘live the values’ together, and how they would hold each to account for doing so.

The Impact

In the early days after the rollout of the process, the client reported it had been a fantastic exercise for everyone across the council. Team members spoke honestly with each other about how they worked together, and wanted to work together, and were keen to agree what they would do to keep the values and behaviours in mind every day. This included exploring how to bring the Performance expectations and Values & Behaviours together, so that everyone would have a very clear picture of what was expected.

It was further reported that this exercise had given good insight into what the council could do even better in setting up their people – at all levels – to succeed in delivering great services to the community.

A number of years have since passed, and the feedback from the client is that the values continue to resonate in the council and guide people’s behaviour. This bears testament that the values have successfully been woven into the fabric of ‘how we do things’.

Subsequent to the initial project, we have been re-engaged multiple times to work with leaders at all levels in the council to help shape and drive a constructive, high performing and accountable culture.

“We still talk about the approach to engaging our people in the design of our values and behaviours, and that they belong to all of us. Our most recent Employee Engagement Survey saw a 12-point increase and top quartile performance (Australia/New Zealand benchmark) for people across the organisation adhering to our values and behaviours.”