CULTURE CHANGE MEASUREMENT FOR A GLOBAL ADVERTISING COMPANY

Improving Sustainability and Employee and Community Engagement for a Global Advertising Company in Australia

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Overview

The Australian arm of this leading global media company was concerned about pockets of low job satisfaction and employee engagement. Culturally and socially diverse, the company appeared to be generally healthy with good results, but high turnover in several job families and locations was starting to affect the culture and performance of the business overall. In parallel, the company also wanted to deliberately change its organisational culture to be an industry leader in sustainability practices.

Client Objectives

• to identify patterns of low employee satisfaction and engagement and diagnose any associated organisational factors

• to implement targeted organisational cultural change initiatives to address any issues identified

• to introduce performance measures of sustainability relating to the environment, innovation, and community engagement to align the culture change with their existing leadership capability framework.

Solution

After conducting interviews and focus groups to understand the business-specific context, we designed a highly-tailored employee engagement and sustainability survey for the client. The survey measured the perceived gaps between importance and performance of organisational factors such as leadership capability, relationships at work, and safety and well-being. The engagement survey was piloted and improved before deployment and we developed a suite of communications material to support the program. Statistical analyses of the results confirmed that the engagement survey was a valid and reliable tool, and could indeed help to identify the issues within specific departments and job families.

Outcomes

We presented the findings to the leadership group who, after a series of presentations around the country by the CEO, then cascaded the information to their teams. Managers were coached to have collaborative discussions with their staff to generate bottom-up solutions to any issues. A set of recommendations was collated and then improvements made to the organisation’s leadership capability framework, reward frameworks, leadership development programs, social events, and work/life balance initiatives.

The survey, initiated in 2007, has been repeated every two years since. This repetition has enabled the tracking over time of the significant improvements in staff engagement that result from targeting culture change initiatives.  Each iteration of the survey has also offered new ideas for change and improvement. The fifth bi-annual survey was conducted in mid-late 2015.