Culture by Design for Local Government

Industry: Community, Local Government
Expertise: Culture by Design

Building a culture for the business and people to thrive

Still emerging from COVID-19 and with a new vision and strategy, the Executive team of a large Western Australian metropolitan local government with approximately 850 employees, turned its attention to culture. The City wanted to get a current state of play, from which to build a culture that enabled its employees to thrive.

What did we help achieve?

Organisation-wide consultation and in-depth conversations around current and desired future culture which resulted in:

Co-created future aspirational culture statement
Agreed set of leadership principles
Refreshed set of organisational values
Priority culture development areas for the Executive Team to focus on
Culture measured and benchmarked as a baseline to assess progress
Commitment to pulse the culture on an ongoing basis

The Challenges

What was important to achieve?

Previous efforts at culture change had not met expectations as interpretation and use of culture diagnostics had proved difficult and unsatisfactory.

The City was keen to :

Explore opportunities to better serve the community
Drive collaboration and empowerment of staff
Reduce employees operating in silos
Enhance operational effectiveness
Create a flourishing workplace underpinned by high performance

The Keogh Approach

A co-creation and partnering approach to ensure engagement and buy-in

The work was undertaken in two phases:

Phase one focused on co-creating the future state culture, working closely with the Executive and HR team and supported by an enthusiastic internal team of culture champions.
Phase two involved the formal measurement of the City’s culture, using Keogh’s own culture survey, Cultivate. Working closely with HR and the culture champions, results were cascaded across the organisation and culture action plans were developed.

More of what we did

Phase 1

Conducted 1:1 interviews with Executive team members to explore their views on the current culture, the desired future state culture, and potential actions that could be taken to a bridge the gap.
Conducted focus groups to understand current culture and gather feedback on the desired future culture.
Discussed initial findings and key themes with culture champions. An aspirational culture statement and draft leadership principles derived from the focus group discussions were also discussed.
Supported the culture team to test the aspirational culture statement and leadership principles with key stakeholders.
Facilitated a workshop with the Executive Team, the aspirational culture statement and leadership principles were discussed and signed-off.
Prepared a draft Leader Guide describing what good looked and sounded like for a sample of the behaviours underpinning the new leadership principles.
Partnered with our PR partner to design a series of roadshows to engage employees in the culture change narrative. These were hosted by the Executive Team and led by the CEO.
Provided the culture champions with an approach to refresh the organisation values.
Developed a culture action plan for the City to consider.

Phase 2

The City engaged Keogh to deploy Cultivate (Keogh’s culture survey) across the organisation.
Reports were produced for the whole of the organisation, directorate and business unit levels
An executive workshop, which included the culture champions, was held to discuss the results and determine next steps.
Feedback sessions on the report findings were conducted for the respective Directorates.
An upskilling workshop was delivered to HR practitioners to equip them to effectively cascade the culture results and support action planning in the business.

Summary of the Results

The City now has a clear description of the culture it needs to build that will not only help it deliver its strategy, but also help its employees to thrive, reinforced by a refreshed set of organisational values.

Additionally, leaders have a clear set of principles, behaviours and guidelines that will help them lead the culture change.

Through the Cultivate Survey, the City has a clear idea of its current culture, and the areas it needs to focus on to achieve its aspiration.

A commitment to conducting regular pulse checks will ensure the City maintains momentum and regularly receives feedback on the effectiveness of its culture action plans.