The Situation
Established in 1989, HomeStart is a State Government organisation that is 100% focused on providing home loans for South Australians. HomeStart had an ambitious strategic plan to improve their financial stability and grow their portfolio in order to make home ownership a reality for more people in more ways in South Australia. To be successful, they knew they needed the right culture to support execution. In fact, it was so important that Culture was named one of the three key priorities for the next three years.
HomeStart conducted the OCI/OEI culture survey to identify what their aspirational culture looked like, understand what their existing culture looked like, and to get insights into what actions they could take to close the gap between the two.
Key Insights from Culture Survey
The OCI showed that HomeStart had a people orientated culture and some real positives. This was a place where people were encouraged, developed, and got along well. It could however tend to be passive – people could at times avoid making tough decisions or taking calculated risks. The downsides of the passive elements in the culture were having an impact on HomeStart.
From this data, HomeStart could see that there were several key causal factors to change in order to convey expectations of Achievement behaviour. Based on these insights, HomeStart identified which causal factors they would work on. Their development plan illustrated in the ‘I Make a Difference’ ladder (click to enlarge).
At the top of the ladder was delivering their strategic plan and focus on culture. At the foundation of the ladder were their values of Achievement, Simplicity, and Integrity. The rungs in between were the key actions and steps they would take to deliver on their strategic objective of building an Achievement Culture. Click on the table beside to see a summary of the Causal
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