by
Dominic Gourley
| Sep 14, 2017
Congratulations to our Australian, 2017 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). Transforming and sustaining culture is no easy task. All of our winners have put in the work and should be proud of what they have achieved. This year we are pleased to publicly announce eight award winners:
Transformation Award Winners:
Care Options
External Change Agent:
Veraison Development
Over 18 months, Care Options has adapted to vast regulation changes in the aged care industry and gone through an organisational restructure. Focusing on our organisational culture was vital to our success. Our people were struggling with constant change, and there was a lack of communication and connection with each other that was causing problems. The OCI/OEI was used to identify what we could build on, and how we could improve to develop a constructive and supportive organisational culture. At this stage of our culture optimisation program we have seen remarkable change. Our staff are connected to each other and feel as though they can make a difference within the organisation, and for clients. Maintaining our current gains and moving towards a more ‘blue’ culture is an integral part of our future. Care Options merged with two other organisations in December 2016 and culture is a high priority in the integration process. We are already using the lessons learned at Care Options, to build our new organisational culture.
Read the Care Options Case Study Here
Home Start Finance
At HomeStart our people are at the heart of our success. We recognise the importance of creating a culture where our people can bring their whole selves to work. We know that our people passionately identify with our values and reason for being and this creates opportunity for our people to thrive and innovate. We have a number of programs that cut across holistic employee wellbeing, employee development and enriched work practices that help our people be the best that they can be for themselves and the business.
While we are a financial institution, our organisation’s reason for being is to, “make home ownership a reality for more people in more ways.” This reason for being means that employees who join HomeStart benefit from working for an organisation that has a greater purpose which contributes significantly to employee intrinsic motivation. We know that the constructive culture we are striving for will support our vision to become a truly high performing organisation and the Human Synergistics tools provide us with objective data to identify the things we should do more of, while also identifying what we need to try and do less of, therefore accelerating our journey.
Our ultimate aim is for every person in our business to positively contribute to the growth of HomeStart and also to their own personal growth and development.
Property Council Australia
In 2014 Property Council of Australia embarked on a significant organisational renewal phase under a new CEO. This involved a new strategy, fresh member mandate, strengthened governance, an executive team refresh and a significant focus on organisational culture. Human Synergistics were brought in to measure staff culture in 2014, 2015 and 2016. The results informed a strong people and culture workplan to foster engagement and alignment with the organisation’s new values. We have also had a close focus on what it means to be a leader in the Property Council. Our refreshed executive team has undergone two rounds of 360 review assessments and supportive coaching, also conducted by Human Synergistics. This is now being extended to our next tier of managers. Becoming a high performance organisation is a journey that never stops, but the Property Council has undergone a significant transformation over the past three years. Our work on culture has been central to this.
Sustainability Awards:
CE Net
External Change Agent:
Insight Elite Performance Psychology
CEnet is a member based shared services organisation and has experienced rapid growth. We knew we had a great culture but how could we describe it? What we wanted to achieve was to preserve what we had as we rapidly grew in team members. We chose to use Human Synergistics supported by Insight Elite Performance Psychology to create our culture baseline to understand what the magic was. We needed to maintain a collaborative and achievement oriented culture to provide high levels of member satisfaction and innovation. We now can measure and plan initiatives to maintain and foster our successful culture and have a common language to ultimately provide exceptional member service.
City of Charles Sturt
The City of Charles Sturt is a large and diverse organisation of around 500 employees. Our culture is a key part of delivering outcomes for our community, providing excellent customer service and having a meaningful, challenging and rewarding career at Charles Sturt. Since embarking on our cultural journey in 2002, we have aligned the four constructive styles to our Corporate Values and living these values is important to us. We celebrate the way we live our values through promoting them throughout the organisation. We believe this is an important step in helping us build our culture. The continual improvement in the organisation’s constructive culture and a strong focus on leadership at all levels has significantly resulted in increased staff satisfaction, improved staff ownership and understanding of Council’s strategies, improved systems and processes, and a strong emphasis on providing great customer service to the community. The OCI Culture Transformation Achievement Award received in 2012, followed by the OCI Culture Transformation Sustainability Awards received in 2014 and 2016 is recognition of Council staff’s continued commitment to the organisation and Council’s long term strategic direction.
Shape Group
SHAPE has been measuring culture and employee engagement for more than a decade. As we’ve developed a more constructive culture we have seen customer satisfaction levels increase markedly. Improved financial performance has followed. Building and maintaining a constructive culture is invariably about people decisions. It’s about getting the right leadership team in place and making sure that constructive behaviours are modeled and the less effective defensive styles aren’t ignored when they occur. All of our people have ongoing personal development training utilising the HS LSI & GSI tools and an environment of informal multi-directional feedback exists at SHAPE.
We know we are on the right track when customer feedback consistently talks of an exceptional project journey and experience. This can only be delivered by a team of outstanding people working as one.
The Westport Club
The Westport Club is a registered club in the regional town of Port Macquarie, New South Wales and has a vision “to make a significant contribution to the quality of community life”. We undertook our first OCI in 2007, through that process we grew an appreciation that there was a significant opportunity for us to deliver a meaningful connection between Organisational Culture and the embodiment of our vision.
Our commitment to our people is to provide a supportive and nurturing environment, a workplace where self improvement is encouraged, mistakes are an opportunity to learn, and all team members are supplied with the correct tools and support they need to do their job and achieve their personal goals. Over the past 10 years our focus and energy has been to role model and demonstrate the ‘how we do things’ as opposed to being primarily focussed on what we do. This ongoing effort has strengthened our reputation in Port Macquarie not only as an employer of choice but as a community-minded organisation working with locals to make Port Macquarie a better place to live.
Sustainability & Chairman's Award
Kennards Self Storage
Kennards Self Storage received our very first Transformation Award in 2006. 2017 marks multiple Sustainability Awards and 18 years of maintaining a Constructive culture throughout a variety of challenges including acquisitions and the impact of the GFC. Kennards surveys their culture every year as part of their ongoing performance measures. Human Synergistics wants to recognise this outstanding achievement and Kennards relentless commitment to helping make the world a more Constructive place.
At Kennards Self Storage we conducted our first OCI in 1998 and have been measuring culture every year since then. The annual OCI acts like a health check for the business. The results are interrogated to identify areas of improvement, what we should do more of, less of, or keep doing. We believe strongly that a constructive culture enhances our teams enjoyment of the job fostering an environment where people feel valued; where they can be themselves and be open; they are engaged and feel their contribution can make a difference. It underpins our appetite for change to improve our business and is essential to the quality of our personal contact with customers to make the experience memorable.
Congratulations to all of this year's - well deserved - award winners!