The situation

In partnership with Mindyasa, ACT had recently defined their new North Star which clarifies the purpose of their organisation and anchors their decision making. To ensure that the roll out of the North Star was effective and had real impact, it was critical to help ACT Team Members understand what that meant for them. By developing a clear set of core values, and supporting behaviors, expectations were made clear and could be easily recognized and rewarded.

ACT needed to provide clarity to their team members on how they were expected to behave, and what the core values were for the organisation. It had to underpin and guide their key decisions across all parts of the organisation and form a basis for their emerging culture.

Challenges

With multiple sub-cultures within the organisation that were conflicting and confusing for team members, the new CEO and her new senior management team had to find a way to get aligned and start to build a consistent culture.

The approach

Core values and behaviors are a key organisational tenet that helps build a culture that is a careful balance of aspiration and reality – it is a clear signpost to your people about what is expected of them in their day to day experiences at work.

To develop the core values we worked closely with the Talent Strategy team to capture as wide a range of inputs and insights as possible. These included the North Star, the brand personality, and employee engagement survey data. We also used our two step process to capture insights directly from employees.

The first of these was to speak with a wide selection of key leaders and long term team members over 20 interviews, to hear their stories about ACT’s ‘meaningful moments’. This process helps identify the key moments in an organisation’s journey where they stayed true to their purpose, and made decisions not based on their short term advantage, but because they reflect who they were as an organisation. From these interviews we uncovered real life stories that showcased the most important attributes that ACT holds dear.

We then went wide – and engaged all team members in a short survey asking them about their personal values and their perception of ACT’s values, finally asking them which overlapped, and what they felt ACT’s values should be. We collated over 2500 data points, ensuring that we included a wide and diverse range of voices from across the organisation.

Having analysed and assessed all of this data, we were able to identify key themes that we could prove were recurring and consistent. Using these themes, we worked with the Talent Strategy team to develop and iterate a set of values and behaviours, that were then tested against the North Star, as well as by the team members that participated in the ‘meaningful moments’ interviews and the senior management team.

Once we had what was close to a final draft it was shared with the Board and all team members for their reflections and feedback – we incorporated that and drove alignment with the CEO, the Talent Strategy and Management Team to ensure that what we had created was a powerful and clear expression of what is important to ACT, and the type of employees that would thrive at ACT.

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