Challenge:
Slater & Gordon began 2019 with a focus to become the UK’s leading legal services provider. Having grown rapidly through acquisition, they needed to fully integrate disjointed business units to become one company with one culture.
Colleagues from across the business were asked to share their insight and perspectives about what makes up their culture to create the S+G way – a new operating system to underpin their new people strategy.
Harmonics global technology partner, The Happiness Index, provided the data and insight to create a “Gap analysis”: outlining where the organisational culture currently was and where the gaps existed to meet the needs of the new model.
Then alongside bringing the values to life visually, Slater & Gordon designed a culture shift plan to help embed the new operating system.
“We don’t see ourselves as a traditional law firm, we’re a legal services business, and that’s why Culture is so key to us. We know that capturing employee voice is critical to building culture and engagement. We do things differently as we see ourselves as different.”
– Alicia Alinia | Chief People Officer
Solution:
- Slater & Gordon invested in leadership training and extensive face-to-face and digital communications to launch the new cultural model.
- The Happiness Index was used to measure the impact of launch activities, Leadership and Team events as well as to undertake a full culture assessment a few months into the programme.
- The insight dashboard enabled the culture team to drill down into different themes to track key focus areas and create targeted actions.
- All feedback and actions are shared and communicated back to the business to demonstrate transparency, highlight that the business values everyone’s opinion, and to improve internal communication.
- During the Covid-19 pandemic, The Happiness Index provided a Future of Work survey that enabled the organisation to understand how their people wanted to work in the future.
“We use The Happiness Index in a variety of different ways. We use it for cultural assessment surveys and culture event feedback which is so important to us. We are able to track sentiment across the business from different audiences in different ways – as and when we need to.”
– Caroline Ward | Head of Culture & Communications
The Results:
- Due to committed communication and action plans informed by their survey data and insight, Slater and Gordon saw a massive boost in scores.
- Following analysis of the Future of Work survey, Slater & Gordon launched a new flexible “work from anywhere” model which will see the closure of their London office.
Data-Backed Decisions Drive Sustained Improvement in Scores
- Employer Net Promoter Score (eNPS) shot up 65 points to +29 (an incredible increase for a company of c2,000 people)
- “How satisfied are you with the information you receive about what is happening at Slater & Gordon?”(Communication) rose from 5.8 to 8.3 (2.5 point increase)
- Most importantly (especially in the current climate): ”How happy are you to be working at Slater & Gordon?” saw a 1.9 point increase from 6.2 to 8.1
