Helping a leading financial services team build a proactive risk culture that supported their growth strategy
Where they were
Goodbody is a leading financial services provider. Across the UK and Ireland, they offer wealth management, asset management and investment banking services.
In 2021, Goodbody had just been re-acquired by Allied Irish Bank. The process had been a lengthy one, leaving employees with a lack of clarity about what their future looked like. As a result, morale was low, turnover was high and day-to-day performance had slipped.
Where they needed to get to
Following the acquisition, it was clear that Goodbody needed a new strategy to set themselves up for future success and to bring their people back on board with the direction the organisation was taking. They needed to get to the bottom of what was keeping employees from performing at their best, and to make a lasting shift in organisational behaviour.
More specifically, Goodbody also needed to realign everyone’s focus on risk and compliance. They had some new regulatory requirements that needed to be implemented, and were looking to improve their risk and compliance culture so that compliance was a part of everybody’s day-to-day responsibilities.
How we drew the roadmap
Our work with Goodbody followed our award-winning 3-stage culture change methodology. Here’s how that looked in practice.
Stage 1: Insight
Goodbody’s employees were at the heart of this shift – both due to the uncertainty they’d faced in the acquisition process, and the strategic changes that the firm was trying to implement. So the first step had to be knowing what the company’s current culture looked like from their perspective.
During our Insight phase, we listened to as many voices across the organisation as possible. Those voices helped us to:
- Understand the lived reality of Goodbody’s current culture
- Pinpoint where that reality diverged from the culture they needed to create
- Identify what parts of the current culture enabled performance and conduct, and what inhibited it
Once we had these insights, we were able to do two things. The first was to create a set of clear culture priorities that could bridge the gap between the current reality and Goodbody’s strategic goals.
The second was to bring those priorities to the executive and senior leadership teams, helping everyone agree on the case for change and see a clear path through the complex issues they’d been facing.
Stage 2: Design
Building on the insights we’d gathered, the next phase was to work with a subset of employees from across the organisation to create a new picture of what Goodbody’s culture needed to be.
Together with everyone involved, we redefined Goodbody’s business purpose and created four new cultural values that would help embed that purpose into everyday behaviour. We also created a strategic narrative connecting Goodbody’s past and present to its future culture and strategic goals. This helped to bring the new culture to life and realign employees with the direction Goodbody was taking.
We then developed a 12-month communication plan to launch the new culture throughout the business. This gave Goodbody a practical, step-by-step roadmap for making sure everyone was being taken on the change journey together.
And as the new culture was being implemented, we developed a culture dashboard and a set of metrics and reporting routines to track how well the culture shift was going. This ensured that culture and performance was improving to where it needed to be, regulatory requirements were being proactively met, and any areas for improvement were easy to identify.
Stage 3: Embed
The final phase of Goodbody’s culture shift wasn’t to simply launch the culture but to fully embed it at every level of the organisation.
To do this we used our unique team-based embedding approach to make sure employees fully understood the new culture. This involved a series of in-person immersion events, leader-led workshops, and manager upskilling to ensure that everyone was at the level they needed to be to lead the culture shift themselves.
With team-based embedding, Goodbody was able to see their new values turned into clear behaviours and expectations, truly moving the dial on how the organisation operated day-to-day.
Culture Consultancy also helped Goodbody to shape their HR strategy, providing critical feedback to ensure that the firm’s new culture definition was embedded throughout the entire employee life cycle.
Where Goodbody is now
Since launching the new culture and values, Goodbody has gone on to win Best Medium Organisation and Best Transformation Initiative at the 2023 Business Culture Awards.
Goodbody has continued to use our dashboard and regular culture check-in surveys to track the performance of the new culture. These surveys have shown that:
Risk culture has improved
- “My manager encourages my team to proactively consider risk in all our activities” – increased to 4.36 (out of 5) vs. 2.35 in 2021.*
- “I feel comfortable to speak up (e.g. when something doesn’t feel right, or to share concerns)” increased to 4.28 vs. 2.35 in 2021.*
Belief in the firm's future has increased
- 95% of employees believed the adoption of the new values would make Goodbody a better place to work.
- 90% believed the values would help reach strategic goals.
Team-based embedding has created sustainable change
- 88% expressed that their session strengthened their understanding of the firm’s new values.
- 96% felt that the workshops supported further embedding of the values into their teams.
- A new “Work as one” value – created with the intention of enhancing collaboration and creating a more inclusive environment – now consistently scores in the top two lived valued.
Award-winning Goodbody culture
Goodbody & Culture Consultancy won 2 awards at the 2023 Business Culture Awards – Best Medium Organisation and Best Transformation Initiative
“Throughout the journey, CC been very effective at coming up with practical solutions and ideas to tackle issues that have arisen. We have developed a real partnership of trust over the course of our journey so far and believe the work we have done together is starting to make a significant and positive impact on our culture and organisational effectiveness.”
Sarah Moriarty, Head of Corporate Affairs at Goodbody
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