Culture by Design

“Everything that surrounds us becomes a part of us.” — Fernando Pessoa, Portuguese poet and writer.

In all its simplicity, an individual’s surrounding is what makes the most of them. This is one of the reasons why company leaders, today, are so inclined to establish a positive work culture in their organization. Workplace alignment not only urges employees to push their productive boundaries but also establishes overall business excellence in an organization.

The core responsibility to make this happen normally falls on the shoulders of a company’s HR department. Apart from the tactical admin and advisory duties, they always have to ensure that they are upholding a firm’s values, visions, and underlying beliefs. However, Mary Buckley and Marie Johnston, (the co-founders of Culture by Design), believe that the core responsibility of defining and building workplace culture excellence should actually sit with the CEO and the entire executive (C-Suite) team, including HR. The HR team of course plays a fundamental role in the execution of any workplace culture strategy. However, this is in line with culture decisions made by the full executive team and championed first and foremost by the CEO of the company.

With 40 years of experience in global corporate HR, culture development, and business improvement, Mary and Marie decided to explore how building a positive workplace culture could proactively support an organization in achieving its desired goals and aspirations. “This idea led to the genesis of Culture by Design—an organization that aids in shifting and improving the cultural paradigm of an enterprise and fueling its growth,” states Mary. While collectively scouting through the global corporate work culture scenario, Mary and Marie deciphered that the robust work culture of an organization is underpinned by strong, mature leadership capability. The businesses that allow ‘flexibility’ and provide ‘psychological safety’ to their employees have a higher probability of succeeding than those who follow a rigid framework. Multiple factors like clarity of direction, emotional stability, cohesive teamwork and safe ability to challenge, all influence the business outcome of the organization.

“Workplace culture will happen either by accident or by intelligent design. If organizations leave their culture to chance, they no longer have any real control on what happens in their workplace culture,” states Mary and Marie. Hence, Culture by Design leverages its end-toend workplace culture excellence system called Acentia to address the challenge of intelligent design. Before deploying Acentia in an organisation, the Culture by Design team will prepare the C-Suite leadership team (including the CEO), to ensure they have detailed clarity on Acentia, they understand the critical part they play in its success, and next steps on the implementation approach. It is an implementation approach that involves a comprehensive assessment of the existing organizational work culture of the clients to understand what kind of strategy should be implemented.

“We strongly believe in performing a climate check of an organization in the initial phase, as it gives us an insightful headstart in our journey with a client,” saysMarie. What delineates Culture by Design and their Acentia system from many other workplace culture systems is what happens next. The workplace culture assessment enables the intelligent design of a bespoke workplace culture strategy, which is then converted into a tactical execution plan for an organisation. This execution plan includes the identification of prioritized Acentia workplace culture toolkits (the toolkits include clear guidance and all relevant tools, learning modules, and workshops), which are necessary to deploy on the bespoke plan. The Culture by Design team will then work with the organisation to create an inhouse Culture team (for the purpose of building organisational selfsufficiency), with each one of the internal Culture team members attending the Acentia Academy. This academy has the primary purpose of accrediting inhouse team members in the use of Acentia toolkits, with the central theme of developing the internal Culture team members into inhouse workplace culture specialists.

Workplace culture will happen either by accident or by intelligent design. If organizations leave their culture to chance, they no longer have any real control on what happens in their workplace culture

Culture by Design also offers a streamlined version of Acentia, which is called Acentia Core. It is specially designed for small or medium scale businesses.

To further bring out the core competencies of the company, the founders share an interesting customer story where they were appointed to work with a professional services firm. This firm while achieving success at one level, had been in a stuck cycle of no growth for close to 20 years. With most of the partnership team nearing retirement age, and no substantive succession plan in place to bring through new partners, there was a desperate need to push the reset button to ensure both the company’s ongoing survival and ability to grow. Hence, Culture by Design began firstly with supporting the company’s partnership level to establish alignment by identifying their core ideology (i.e. core purpose and core company values) and envisioned future. Using the Acentia system, Mary and Marie then lead the business to define and build an intelligently designed workplace culture, which aligned to and supported the execution of the company’s identified core purpose and realization of the future vision for the organisation. Since then, Marie and Mary have been working to develop a strong sense of self sufficiency within this company to ensure that the organisation has everything it needs to anchor and stabilize workplace culture excellence as an ongoing key driver for business growth.

The aforementioned story is just a snippet of the vast service portfolio of Culture by Design. Future plans include augmenting their research competencies with a new research and development design team. Currently, Culture by Design offers its services across public and private sectors such as arts, education, agriculture, medical, and retail, along with government agencies and emergency providers. The company plans on expanding and establishing a number of franchises throughout New Zealand (Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch) and Australia (Melbourne, Sydney, and Perth). Moving ahead with such pivotal grace, the company is proliferating and emerging as a harpoon for organizations to fuel growth from within.