Datacom is Australasia’s largest homegrown tech company. Datacom has grown primarily through acquisitions, leading to many sub-cultures co-existing across the organisation and the CEO identified that the existing company values were no longer relevant to many parts of the organisation and were not enabling the Board or executive team to make decisions or drive performance. Q5 were chosen to redefine Datacom’s corporate values and behaviours and develop an implementation plan to activate them across the organisation.
In the first phase, we engaged across the business to understand what they valued most about Datacom’s existing culture and felt was critical for the future: we interviewed 44 leaders from the Board, leadership team and senior management, held 22 virtual workshops, for each Datacom location and ran a survey across the organisation to gather input on the future values. The principles that underpinned the approach were transparency, ownership by Datacom, respect for the organisations history and a balance of external and internal perspectives in to the process.
In the second phase we mobilised a cross-functional design team of ten and ran an intensive design process to craft the new values and behaviours. We held a knowledge sharing session with Air New Zealand on how they had integrated Indigenous heritage into their culture and values; we brought in a D&I subject matter expert to educate the design team on equity and inclusion.
We used Organisational Network Analysis to identify their ‘top 100 most influential people’ in the organisation, then brought them together to test the draft values and behaviours and mobilise as a change agent network. Finally, we created an implementation plan and designed and facilitated leadership activation sessions with the leadership team and the top 300 leaders to launch the new values.
"We are an organisation that is going through a period of change right now. Therefore, it was just fabulous to work with people who took the time to understand us, our situation, the nuances of some of the stakeholders, and could be accepted and listened to by the CEO. There was no time wasted, fabulous listening skills, fast translation of the theoretical approach into action planning and overall Q5 have delivered some great outcomes that will take us forward and then some."
