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Podcast #09: Is there a clash between a firm’s or organisations desired culture and the firm’s actual way of working? (listen online)
Interviewees: | | John Eales
Director | | |  | | Justin Papps
Practice Leader Integration | |  | | Amanda Rudd
Senior Consultant |
Latest readings since the Awards in ALB, Boss and BRW continue to refer to the economic climate and the importance of focusing on the internal areas of the business, with a major focus on staff retention. For example the CEO of a leading law firm in Australia states “If we wanted to move the firm forward, we knew we needed to make an effort to inform and engage our staff.” This firm over the past four years has reduced staff turnover from 23.5 per cent to 17.5 per cent. This is a tremendous result considering the competitive employee candidate market.
Is there a clash between a firm’s or organisations desired culture and the firm’s actual way of working?
In this podcast we address the ‘why’s and the how’s’ of the clash many Firms are experiencing in their desired culture and the actual way the Firm operates in a day-to-day. The focus of the debate is that once you identify the gaps between desired and actual culture you can pragmatically shift the ‘ways of doing things around here’ to mirror the desired culture and benefit from the strategic advantages an effective culture can deliver.
Following an introduction by John Eales - especially recorded for the 2008 Mettle ALB Australasian Law Awards - on the importance of celebrating success during the challenging times, John introduces fellow Mettle Director and Lawyer Justin Papps and Senior Consultant Amanda Rudd who debate the clashes between desired culture and actual ways of working many Law Firms experience. They will give insights into how Firms can identify the gaps in their culture and shift behaviours, mindsets, symbols and systems towards creating and managing a culture which will achieve strategic success and competitive advantage.
| | | | | | | Amanda Rudd
Senior Consultant |
This On Your Mettle Podcast discusses how leaders and organisations can create and maintain a culture that will attract, retain and develop talent. We also provide a 'though leadership insight' into a future podcast "The workplace of 2020", which looks at how leaders can prepare for the required shift in leadership methodologies, culture and workplace design.
Read any HR or Leadership article and you will most likely come across a reference to the staff attraction and retention challenge that is facing organisations. This podcast outlines practical solutions leaders can execute to address this critical issue. The solution to retaining staff does not involve throwing quantities of money or knee-jerk benefits at staff, rather, as the results of a recent salary survey conducted by Michael Page International which polled 33-- employers and 2100 employees cited career advancement as a reason for moving on, yet only 9% said more money was the primary motivator. To put it plainly, the solution to the staff attraction and retention issues come down to more intensive and smarter management from business leaders. As a recent BRW article said, the next five years will be even tougher for management as the problem is being compounded by the global economy - employers need to protect their human assets, not just against domestic competitors, but also against overseas talent hunters.
 | | Dani Fraillon
Director Melblourne &
Org Design Practice | |  | | Craig McCallum
General Manager, Marketing & Corporate Services |
This On Your Mettle Podcast discusses the critical role leaders, culture and structure must play within organisations to realistically embrace CSR and how to create a CSR ethos through your leaders, culture and structure.
Media stories, company annual reports and environmental findings continuously address issues around the need for organisations to engage in CSR. With the global focus clearly on how business can reduce their impact on the environment, this podcast outlines solutions and steps leaders can take to meet employee, customer and societal demands and how to build a culture and create employee engagement around building a sustainable socially responsible organisation.
No matter the focus of your CSR strategy, if you don't have your people engaged, the strategy will not create the desired effect on the environment or within the organisation.
This podcast discusses several insights from neurosciences that assist us in improving leadership and culture in organisations including: Understanding the attention deficit trait (ADT); The power of meditation and why it will lead to less ADT, more innovation and better leadership in our culture; The counterintuitive findings that neuroscience is showing us about culture change; The trust as well as the respect and suspension we need to put in use our “Blink” like intuition; and Nurturing the diversity of thought processes, particularly as they related to men and women.
We live in a world that at last is attempting to learn between disciplines: religion information science, science informing business, business informing psychology, psychology informing marketing, marketing informing technology, among others. In Australia each year, well-known CEO’s and Board members gather for two days in retreat to learn among other skills, how to calm their mind more effectively so that they can think more innovatively and be more effective for their people. Harvard and Insead Business Schools talk about the two most potent tools of the 21st century being intuition and meditation. Harvard Business Review writes about executives and their new attention deficit trait overloaded circuits in their mind. Functional MRI and other technologies are sharing with us more and more information about how the mind works, helping us to understand how behaviours can be changed and innovative thinking can be improved in our organisational cultures.
Mettle Groups’ research and 20 years experience shows that business strategy works best when backed by congruent behaviour, symbols and systems and aligning the culture to the businesses strategy. The key discussion points throughout this podcast are “If culture is about ‘how things are done around here’, how does a business go about aligning or strengthening its culture and if everything including structure and systems are interlinked with strategy and culture, where does a business start in connecting strategy, culture, structure and systems?”
Interviewee:
| | | |  | | Liana Di Stefano
Practice Leader Research |
Organisations have adopted a number of ‘staff or engagement surveys’ to gain an understanding of what is happening in the organisation however are struggling to deal with survey results overload that provide very little insight. Mettle believes that the people factor makes the difference in organisations achieving their strategy, so holding the mirror up, getting the insights and charting a course of action are all equally important. The link to success is the human dimension and that can make or break a companys success. People need to be ignited to produce both short and long term success for a company.
Interviewee:
| |
| | | | Liana Di Stefano
Practice Leader Research |
Companies can create competitive advantage by combating internal efficiencies and generate an impetus for long-term change. While changing culture requires planned effort, you can take some very practical steps to begin to position your organisation for growth and to gain competitive advantage. A company’s culture will either support businesses to achieve speed to market and deliver on promises or, adversely, it will slow them down and cause them to go over budget, not meet targets and constantly change priorities.
Interviewee:
 | | Jeremy Nichols
Managing Director | | | | |
Avoid pouring money down the compliance drain
The impact of culture, leadership and employee motivation has been well researched independently, and much evidence has been found to highlight the importance of managing the people side of business. Moreover, success in any company is built upon an ability to manage the inherent risks that face business. Risk management is traditionally seen as a compliance and an operational issue. However, we now know that the people side of the business—that is, the culture and mindsets people bring to their work—has a huge impact on the risks faced by any business. A good example of this is Enron, where the profligate attitudes that were the reality of the culture have been identified as the driver of its downfall.
The podcast discusses the goals a business must have to avoid risk and to maximise it success, that is, to make the best possible balance between risk and reward. As well as good compliance protocols and analysis of productivity, a critical element that is often overlooked is softwiring (the people side).
Softwiring gives you another way to manage the risk in a cost-effective way. Without a values-driven culture, no matter how many protocols you put in place, it is impossible to implement risk strategies effectively. You need the commitment and buy-in of your people. Jeremy Nichols and fellow Consultants explain the ways businesses can start the risk assessment and people commitment journey.
Interviewee:
| | | | | | Justin Papps
Practice Leader Integration |
In our latest podcast, we address the topic of building high performance teams and how you can create and maintain these for the success of your business.
Justin Papps and fellow Consultant from Mettle Group talk about how to develop a high performance team, what influences the success of a team and the impact of company culture. Mettle Group works daily to help businesses create shareholder value and company growth by linking a company's culture to its business strategy.
We've outlined the content in the chapters below so you can listen to the whole podcast or skip to the section that is relevant to you.