Michelle Rodger: Employ a culture shift for added value all round

Published on Thursday 14 October 2010 16:03

CULTURE has a huge impact on the success - or otherwise - of an organisation.

It's relatively easy for a start-up to set the tone for the company culture at the outset or even for an SME that doesn't have a large number of employees to manage its culture. It's a complete dawdle if you're in business in America where culture is everything.

But what if you're a large employer? Culture in Scottish business is for wimps who believe that an employee has no more right to fun or reward at work than they do to promotional opportunities and empowerment. And perhaps days off.

You're right. It's tough. But you know what? Change is starting to creep in. Slowly, it has to be said, but surely.

Consider the call centre sector where employees have to wrestle with a deadline on the amount of time available to make and close a call, and a deadline on the amount of calls to make in a specified time. It is not an easy environment in which to work - and certainly not one recognised for quality in customer experience or employee engagement.

Looking back it was hailed as a growth sector, generously funded by the Government and Scottish Enterprise, and was much praised as a major contributor to the Scottish economy. But suddenly, the economic environment changed. The customer mattered. Employees mattered. And the call centre business model had to change.

For Glasgow-based Response, it was a challenge not to be missed. Under the guidance of managing director Brian Bannatyne, a new set of values was introduced and some of the old-style approaches were chucked out of the window. "We want to be the partner of choice for big brands, in terms of innovative customer solutions," says Bannatyne.

But if you are going to provide great customer experience and service and people who can deliver that, you need an engaged and motivated workforce, he says. The problem was Response hadn't invested in either the technology or the people to deliver that service.

When Bannatyne joined in February 2009, Response started asking questions of the 2,500 employees and clients, asking how they liked working there, would they recommend it to their friends as a place to work, how good was the customer experience. The results weren't great.

Traditionally, the contact centre sector was poor for employee pay and the environment. Now Response focuses on career development, creating a path for employees to grow within the organisation and ensuring employees they have a career rather than a job.

And cold calling has been dumped. Those types of conversations aren't about building rewarding relationships, says Bannatyne. They're about getting money back or very hard selling to people who don't already have an affinity with the brand."That's not the type of culture we want to drive the business.

"To build rewarding relationships, employees need to feel valued, they need to be empowered to deliver great service, and we also need to raise the fun level in this business."

Over at Cordia, directors and managers were having a similar discussion. Cordia was a department of Glasgow City Council, which broke away and became an Arms Length Management Organisation. Suddenly, its management realised that the only way to move forward under the new business - and successfully compete against private sector and other public sector firms - was to change the way they did things.

And with 9,000 employees who felt they weren't valued that was no small task. The first thing was to create an identity as part of the change programme and then get the workforce to buy into it.

The "Cordia Way" (CW) was created. The system represents change on a practical level, aimed at managers and supervisors who can influence at least ten people who work with them. They attend a range of workshops and create a project that will make a significant cultural change to the organisation.

So far 240 managers have been involved and of the 24 initiatives created, 22 are being implemented now. Three of those projects are around absence management, a problem the senior management team is well aware of.

Melvin says the cultural change programme is more important than they ever thought. "Without that culture shift and support from the staff, we wouldn't be able to get to where we are now or where we need to be."