Making a measurable impact within a mid-sized financial services firm

Background

Having helped and supported the leadership team to become more effective and more impactful as managers to the wider staff group in this mid-sized financial services firm [Supporting transformative SLT change at a mid-sized financial services organisation], MatchFit continued its work, this time with lower-management grades and specific teams.

Empowerment

The Head of Operations, picks up the story.

“Tim [a MatchFit consultant] was very good at using models that resonate with us as a team and office. One of them was about ‘moving the decision to where the information lies’,” she said.

This and other interventions have helped shift the thinking within the organisation towards empowerment where managers at all grades now have the confidence to make decisions without any fear of repercussion.

“Not only that,” said the operations head, “But they can feel supported by the SLT in those decisions.”

And that’s been transformational, because not everything has to come up through the different hierarchies into the SLT to then make the decisions. This has created a safe space where people feel supported and are helped to make informed decisions, which has made an immense impact to the whole organisation.

Developing the next level of talent

One of the most beneficial pieces of MatchFit’s work was the CLIMB Shadow ExCo Programme, an immersive and interactive programme that develops future leaders and engages talent to deeply understand how leadership should work within an organisation.

“It was just the most brilliant opportunity for a cohort of individuals across the office to be engaged in.

At the time, an organisation-wide staff survey wasn’t as positive as it should have been for a number of themes but the Shadow ExCo was an opportunity to pick up on some of the key areas with the survey and build a programme to address them.

“Via the Shadow ExCo, we were able to undertake projects around innovation, around what makes a good manager, around engagement, around induction, around managing a quality service, and run those projects throughout the course of the programme with those who were on the cohort at the time,” she continued.

The 12-month programme had a hugely positive impact on both the cohort and the wider business too.

Improving the staff survey scores

“We were keen to see how the 2024 people survey results would differ from those in the previous year and to see the benefit from all the work, including the Shadow ExCo programme,” she explained.

The results were unprecedented.

“For the first time ever we’ve seen a positive increase across all our core themes, and it is evident that the work MatchFit has done, the programmes they have run, their interventions have all come through beautifully in our staff survey results,” the Head of Operations continued.

A score related to how people perceived their manager for instance, increased significantly by 11 positive percentage points. This is a huge number which the operations head put down, in part, to the Shadow ExCo programme which helped equip managers with the tools and skills they need to improve their managerial ability.

Other interventions like those relating to having difficult conversations and what a good conversation looks like, again helped to improve scores. Another really positive score was around L&D, which saw a positive percentage increase of 14%.

“That is off-the-scale massive. And again, it’s all the development opportunities we’ve been able to afford for our staff over the past 12 months both internally and with MatchFit’s help which means staff feel more invested in, valued and listened to.” she continued.

One change that the operations head describes as ‘music to my ears’, was the leadership and managing change theme, which saw a huge positive increase of 14%.

“Again, I think it was absolutely as a result of MatchFit doing all that transformational work with the leadership team, and also all their engagement work with the Shadow ExCo programme,” she said.

The work has helped colleagues increase their perception of the SLT in terms of transparency around decision making.

Improving engagement across the organisation

One of the projects on the Shadow ExCo programme was engagement, an important theme for the organisation.

“As a result of what we did with MatchFit, engagement is at the heart of everything we do now. It sounds so simple, and you might ask why wasn’t it at the heart of everything that we did previously. But we were just stuck in that rut of we’ve got our jobs to do. We’re so busy, we haven’t got enough resources, we just need to get through the day-to-day work. That makes it easy to forget that the softer side of what we do is so important. MatchFit really opened our eyes to that,” she said.

Because of the specific engagement work in the Shadow ExCo programme, the organisation now has two engagement champions who regularly work with the senior leadership team to feedback on issues that have arisen and also successes that colleagues want to be fed back to the SLT. A ‘Colleague’s Voice Committee’ has been formed and meets every couple of months.

“We have success boards. We have a new intranet now, which is a one-stop-shop for all our information needs. So it’s really facilitating more regular interaction amongst the senior leadership team with a whole host of people across the organisation. Again, it sounds really, really simple, but it has such a transformational impact on us as a whole,” she continues.

Overall, it has been a lot of hard work to get the organisation to where it is now. But the collaborative joint effort with MatchFit and the opportunity to recognise and address challenges has shone through in the people survey results and benefitted the entire team and business in a positive way.