Culture and purpose
How you do business matters as much as what you do. Your culture and purpose shape your performance, reputation and resilience. Culture is under increasing pressure from a number of competing, and sometimes conflicting factors. Monitoring and assessing the impact of cultural change in the workplace is crucial. A&O Consulting can help you create and sustain a culture that aligns with your strategic goals, meets regulatory expectations and inspires your people.
Many leaders recognise the need to improve their culture and conduct, yet struggle to translate their vision into action. They face complex challenges, such as changing customer demands, evolving regulations, diverse stakeholders and emerging risks.
A&O Consulting have the expertise and experience to help you overcome these challenges and turn them into opportunities. We can help you design and implement a culture strategy that supports your business objectives, embeds ethical standards and drives positive behaviours. We can also help you measure and monitor your culture, identify gaps and risks and provide practical recommendations for improvement.
We tailor our solutions to your specific needs and context. We work with you as trusted partners, combining our deep understanding of your industry and regulatory environment with our innovative and collaborative approach. We help you build a culture that delivers value for your business and your stakeholders.
We can work with you to embed and maintain a strong culture by helping with:
- Conduct risk analysis and reviews
- Corporate purpose, values and culture strategy implementation and advice
- Culture and conduct framework guidance
- Culture health assessments
- Practical solutions to support cultural change
- Culture ambassador programmes
- Training, including culture and conduct training and DE&I training
- Culture and conduct KPIs, executive and employee performance reviews and scorecards
If you would like to learn more about how we can work with you, please get in touch with our consultants.
Client case studies
Assessing culture health and establishing a culture framework
A number of conduct incidents took place at a global bank. The bank wanted to understand the culture of the organisation and the drivers of employee behaviours. We undertook a culture health assessment, which gave the client valuable insights into the main cultural themes and their origins. Our work pinpointed differences between different working locations.
Through our recommendations, the client was able to understand the impact of the pandemic. We also helped develop an end-to-end culture strategy and framework, as well as a culture ambassador initiative.
Delivering scenario-based culture training
We developed and delivered an inclusion and respect training programme at the European headquarters of a global corporation. The programme was tailored to the client’s issues and concerns and designed to enhance employee and managerial cultural understanding. The training covered diversity, inclusion and respect, creating an environment for appropriate behaviours and speaking up in relation to harassment and discrimination.
The training centred around core concepts such as unconscious bias, discrimination and psychological safety, as well as the formal and legal consequences of misconduct. It also sought to create a more engaged, inclusive workplace where misconduct is not tolerated. The success of the pilot means we are now rolling this programme out for the client globally.
Undertaking a culture review
We undertook a culture review of the UK subsidiary of a European bank. Our review included a desktop review of materials relating to the bank’s culture framework and initiatives. We also ran a series of 30 in-person focus groups with over 230 employees from across different business areas and functions and held 1:1 meetings with senior leadership.
We then produced a report of our findings, which highlighted examples of cultural nuances by seniority level, geography and business unit. Our report also included practical remediation advice to enhance their ethics and compliance culture.
Developing a culture strategy
We supported a Tier 1 Bank to enhance culture and conduct engagement, as part of a wider risk culture and controls enhancement programme. This involved a review that spanned culture, strategy, governance, people, policies and controls.
We subsequently ran employee focus groups across various grades and locations to gather views on the firm’s culture. We also had conversations with senior leadership to assess how they were advancing and embedding culture and produced a report outlining strengths, improvement opportunities and recommendations aligned to the client’s existing action plan.
Creating a culture dashboard
We created a dashboard to display and analyse various aspects of a large insurance firm’s organisational culture. This included assessment of values, behaviours, engagement and feedback. We collaborated with the client to define the scope and goals of the dashboard. We identified and aligned the relevant data sources and stakeholders, provided guidance on how to maintain and update the dashboard and ensured it could be used to facilitate meaningful and action-oriented culture conversations.
Our work enabled the client to monitor and improve its culture performance and alignment across the organisation.
