Congratulations to our 2018 Culture Award Winners! The Culture Transformation and Sustainability Awards recognise organisations which have created a Constructive Culture or sustained a Constructive Culture on a subsequent remeasure using the Organisational Culture Inventory® (OCI). This year we are pleased to publicly announce four award winners.
Transformation Award Winners:
Australian Conservation Foundation
External Change Agent: Stevenson Hallifax
The Australian Conservation Foundation is Australia’s national environment organisation. We’re a community of more than half a million people who speak out, show up and act for a world where forests, rivers, people and wildlife thrive. Sadly, our nation faces an extinction and climate crisis - our action must be bolder than ever. Because people created this crisis, people must and can solve it. That makes our culture our most crucial asset.
Our cultural journey has taken four years and while leadership excellence has been a key linchpin, it has involved everyone. We started by implementing two key pillars of organisational performance - a clear strategy that everyone can align behind, and a common sense organisational structure that provides clarity and simplicity. Rather than restructuring top-down, we empowered our people to design the structure they wanted; the structure we have and love today. That single process built incredible trust across the organisation and allowed us to build the collaborative culture we continue to enjoy.
The final pillar was implementing a culture of feedback based on 6 key workplace behaviours: communicative, supportive, respectful, fun, collaborative, and focused. We’ve measured the change, invested in our leaders, using the Leadership/Impact diagnostic and Lifestyles Inventory, and completed 360-degree feedback for all staff. By moving our organisational culture into the ‘blue’ constructive styles, we’re evidently achieving our cultural goals.
Saving the planet is a tough job, so we look after each other to make the changes we need to see in the world.
Lantern Club
Lantern Club is a community focused, registered club situated in Roselands in South West Sydney NSW, a suburb that is densely populated and rich with cultural diversity. The club itself has been part of the local community since 1956, when it was known as Roselands Bowling Club. In recognising the integral role our club plays in the social fabric of the area, we focus our efforts on delivering our vision “to make a significant contribution to the quality of community life”.
To effectively contribute to our community, we have acknowledged the importance of investing in our team and have committed to continuously improve our organisational culture. We completed our first OCI in 2012 and through this process, we gained a deeper understanding of the connection between our people, our culture and the heart of delivering our vision.
We are committed to creating a humanistic-encouraging environment, where constructive conversations are had, wins celebrated, learnings acknowledged and self-improvement encouraged. To achieve this, we underpin our vision and culture with agreed set values, daily tools and authentic conversations. Each and every one of us is a role model, we are community-minded and see ourselves very much as a family within our community. Our purpose is to brighten the lives of those around us.
Sustainability Award Winners:
SHAPE
As our organisational culture improves, we continue to see strong correlations to all of the traditional measures of business success.
Our core strategic objective is ‘to be the place where everyone wants to work’. By attracting, rewarding, developing and retaining the very best people in our industry we have been able to provide a real point of difference to our customers.
The annual OCI survey provides us with the opportunity to ‘drill down’ into subcultures within the organisation, and we are then able to develop appropriate plans for improvement. These plans have centred around shifting defensive leadership styles to more constructive styles. Significantly improved commercial outcomes have followed without exception. By reducing under-performance in some areas of the business, we have been able to lift overall company performance significantly:
Kennards Self Storage
Kennards have been measuring culture for over 20 years and have consistently maintained a Constructive Culture over many re-tests. Maintaining a Constructive Culture - over as longer period as Kennards have achieved - doesn’t happen by chance: it takes leadership and focus. Kennards’ 2018 re-measure showed that they didn’t just maintain their culture but actually achieved a step change improvement in Constructive Styles and reduction of Defensive ones.
Kennards use the OCI as a health check for their business. Insights are generated on areas for improvement and where development energy is best focused. To achieve this year’s result, Kennards removed clocking in/out systems and instead told team members they were trusted. They also refreshed the team with key appointments of highly Constructive leaders, simplified pay structures, and built personal ownership and responsibility for the Culture across every member of the Kennards team.
Congratulations to Kennards for another fantastic achievement and business success!
Congratulations to all of this year's - well deserved - award winners!