Global Organization: Align Culture and Business Strategy

Accenture helped this global organization develop a comprehensive program to change its corporate culture in order to support a renewed business strategy to achieve high performance.

Accenture is a leading global management consulting, technology and outsourcing company. It currently employs more than 215,000 people and has clients in more than 120 countries. The company generated net revenues of US$21.6 billion for the fiscal year ended August 31, 2010. Accenture spends in excess of $1 billion on training per year.

A number of market trends and industry pressures including technical developments, environmental awareness, new competition, shrinking brand loyalty and increasingly demanding consumers had resulted in the client seeking a new strategic direction and demanding change in the behavior of its employees. They needed to be able to make rapid decisions and enhance their customer focus to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage.

Getting all employees to embrace the new strategic direction and adapt to the new culture the client wanted to create was not straightforward. This became clear in the outcome of an employee engagement survey. It showed a marked decrease in engagement levels, even at a senior leadership level. Naturally, this was of great concern to the client and it recognized that it needed insight into how it could address the drop in employee engagement and develop an action plan to ensure the success of its new strategic direction and the satisfaction of its workforce.

The Accenture High Performance Workforce Study 2006 found that workforce performance and talent are of strategic importance to companies looking to achieve and sustain high performance. While technology, strategy and innovative new products and services are important, the workforce is the critical ingredient that ties everything together—translating ideas and goals into results.

Accenture collaborated closely with the client to transform its culture, aligning it to its business strategy. The first step in this process was to assess its current culture and then develop a shared insight into the current and the desired culture by assessing the dominant values in the organization. The globally recognized Values Profile Survey tool was then used in conjunction with interviews and desk research to provide clear and actionable insight into key areas for improvement.

The client’s senior and middle management were involved in the process from the start to lead by example, build trust and transparency, and develop a common baseline for the desired core values in line with the business strategy.
Accenture then developed a culture alignment action plan based on the results of the survey and leadership sessions to provide a starting point and platform for developing specific action plans for each of the client’s business units.

By collaborating with Accenture, the client has gained factual insights into what really motivates its management and employees—their personal values and what they consider to be the “current” and “desired” values of the client—both overall and at department and individual levels. Moreover, the client has also gained insight into the areas of the organization as a whole that are relevant in creating and supporting the desired culture such as performance management, leadership style and the organizational model, including roles and responsibilities.

The action-driven intervention plan Accenture helped the client develop provides a platform for it to act on the insights gained and enables it to measure the results continuously.

Accenture also helped develop a value-based communication strategy to help ensure appropriate and meaningful communication to all employees throughout the transformation journey.

Implementing the action plan will help the client align its culture with its business strategy and lead to greater employee engagement, both of which will help to accelerate the business transformation, and ultimately, to achieve high performance.