Culture transformation program builds trust and connection across a workforce increasing productivity and results.

Category: Organisational design and culture

Challenge

This government division leads the state’s approach to strategic asset management and engineering, facilitates knowledge retention and sharing, and provides trusted advice across government and partners in transport delivery and operations.

People Matter Survey (PMS) results (employee engagement survey) indicated a need to increase trust and connection across this large workforce. The leadership team was eager to address this across the division to set up the workforce to be cohesive, be productive and deliver on their vision.

What Zing & Co did

We partnered with the division’s executive leadership team over an 18-month period to co-design and deliver a workplace culture trust and connection program to improve cohesion, engagement, efficiency and productivity. This included the following:

Co-defined the purpose of the transformation program and the established the ideal culture for the division with the executive.
Partnered with each of the 8 executives to design and facilitate a series of bespoke, branch-level workshops to test the desired culture, define a set of shared behaviours, understand working styles and levels of trust within the leadership cohort and identify actions required to achieve the ideal culture within their branch. This included administering individual and team diagnostics for the 8 Branches and 90 leaders to understand levels of trust across the workforce and opportunities to shift the needle.
Delivered program implementation roadmaps for each branch that identified specific actions and capability uplift requirements.
Sought input to shape the behaviours required to deliver the ideal culture and identified potential implementation barriers.
Facilitated capability uplift sessions across the leadership cohort to the areas of coaching and engaging in intentional and challenging conversations.
Established a series of peer-coaching groups across the leadership cohort with representatives from across the branches to foster connection with other people leaders, role model and continue to build capability across the division.
Developed a communication plan and supported the initial roll-out of this for a period of 6 months, which included the development of key messages for all mediums (SharePoint, email, MS Teams channels, staff forums)
Designed, prepared and distributed a suite of artefacts to support the new culture and behaviour roll-out including; posters, mousepads, MS Teams homepages and customised games.
Provided 1:1 coaching to each of the Executives throughout the program to provide support.

During the first year of the program the Division experienced an 11-point improvement in employee engagement (from 51 to 62) and a 15% increase in response rate.

Furthermore, participant experience rating for this program exceeded 4.5 out of 5 across all aspects of the program.

What you can learn from this organisation

For culture change to be wholesale across the organisation, it’s a good idea to:

Go beyond one-off training programs and deploy an at-scale program of leadership development
Create internal ownership of the approach from the start by involving a network of champions in its creation, roll-out and maintenance
Invest in leadership-development experiences that are emotional, sensory, and create ‘aha’ moments that deepen learnings to support lasting change
Build mechanisms to make development a part of leaders’ day-to-day work.

What the client said about working with Zing & Co

“Engagement with our people across the whole team and at all levels was outstanding. It became a personalised and customised partnership rather than just a service provider.”
[Head of the division]

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