Business Connection Pulse Check: Giving leadership a new window into our organisation

  • Organisation: OMD New Zealand Limited
  • Person: Chris Riley
  • Role: Managing Director
  • Organisation size: 100 people
  • Location: Auckland / Wellington
  • Core Business: Communications & Media Agency

A bit of background

OMD had worked with Blacksmith as a leadership team in the past year so when our annual culture survey came around we talked to Kate and Paul about support with understanding the reality behind the results.  Whilst the overall results were pleasing, there were a few areas we wanted to drill down into further for clarity and to get some insights into the challenges and opportunities that they highlighted.

What was the challenge / opportunity?

Undertaking the Pulse Check gave us the opportunity to understand how “connected” our people are to critical aspects of the business such as our brand promise, values, vision and strategies.  The qualitative process illuminated our survey results with “real stories” that supported the findings in a simple form and enabled our leadership team to further validate and understand the OMD experience for our people and how it might differ from our expectation.

What did we do?

Blacksmith managed the complete process end to end, providing a structure and the “independence” to ensure we received an unfiltered view of what’s actually going on.  Running three focus groups with different layers of our organisation meant we achieved a good cross section of representation without having to impact the entire business and have them feel “over surveyed”

The rigor and discipline behind the process gave us insight into how the layers of our organisation think and certainly uncovered a few areas for us the focus on as a leadership team.

It certainly provided a lot more clarity about what’s going on and where to focus our energy and resources to drive higher levels of engagement and take identified obstacles out of the way of our people performing.

What were the results?

  • Gained clarity of the challenges and opportunities in our organisation and our people
  • It bought to life what we need to focus on and build into our (leadership) plan
  • It unearthed some major issues we as a leadership team were not aware of.

 

“During the last 18 months, the OMD leadership team have undertaken a major step-change to our internal operations and the way we collaborate and engage with our staff.  Paul and Kate from Blacksmith have not only helped with this process; they have been completely instrumental in our delivery of this work. They’ve provided us insight, clarity and advice on our approach which has been of significant value to our business.”

Chris Riley, Managing Director, OMD New Zealand Limited