Problem

As part of the transition from a SME to a larger organisation, this innovative bank recognised the importance of reviewing and strengthening its culture. The Human Resources Director wanted to use The Cambridge Code to understand more about their people and build a baseline for their ‘true’ culture today – creating a robust data-set that could be used to decide what changes were needed to move towards their future vision.

Solution

A representative sample of employees from across the organisation were invited to complete The Cambridge Code (including a mix of gender, grade, function, office, cohort, performance, age). The business was given access to an aggregate dashboard so that they could view and segment the results in different ways to pinpoint certain characteristics and attributes across the organisation and test hypotheses. We also worked with the Human Resources Director to map the results onto the bank’s current values and measure how well the business was ‘living’ these things, and ran workshops to review the findings and identify recommendations for change.

Results

The results were used to build the road-map for culture change. The from The Cambridge Code provided a more scientific way of identifying the underlying drivers of behaviour and culture across the organisation, such as revealing a fundamental disconnect between senior leaders and the wider business. These insights allowed the business to quantify the gap between their current culture and where they wanted to get to, as well as helping them to face into some of the difficult decisions to achieve this. For example, concluding that they might not have the right people in the organisation to achieve certain parts of their vision, such as fostering a more entrepreneurial mindset, and the need for a broader restructuring programme to drive greater focus on individual accountability.