Innovative culture change for new government agency
“Blue Seed worked brilliantly with our Executive team to assist with setting the cultural frame and DNA of this brand new, start-up customer-centric organisation within Government. Blue Seed also developed the strategy for enlivening this new culture and produced high-quality material and collateral to support it. I could not more highly recommend Blue Seed to any organisation looking to achieve effective and lasting culture change. Blue Seed made this important and challenging task simpler and easier to undertake. They provide quality advice on the best strategies to employ to effect change, the most effective tools to use and provide all the support that allows an organisation to effect change without adversely impacting on business as usual activity.”
Deputy Commissioner, Government Agency, 2012
Brief
The NSW Government’s 2012 Simpler Government Service Plan aims to deliver a customer-centric one-stop-government service model in New South Wales as part of the commitment to bring about improved and integrated customer services across NSW Government Services. A new entity, Service NSW, was planned to deliver:
- A single 24/7 NSW Government phone service
- A customer friendly web portal
- One stop shops where multiple transactions are carried out efficiently for customers
- Mobile applications that provide real time information
After the program had already completed its definition and design phase, Blue Seed Consulting was engaged to conduct initial scoping with the People stream to assess the work already completed, identify gaps and make recommendations for the inclusion of a Culture stream as part of the next phase.
Solution
The scoping phase included:
- Fact finding to define the change and understand the environment
- Early stakeholder engagement to scope critical cultural success factors for Tranche 1 implementation, with consideration to
- Stake-holding culture considerations and needs
- Culture gaps and barriers to organisational effectiveness
- Early ideas for Culture Anchoring activities to integrate espoused values & behaviours as actual with project & new business teams
- Early thinking on the best Culture transformation approach for next phase of work, including measures for success, recommendations for implementation, enabling leadership alignment and BAU ownership all in line with the Behaviour Engineering Model
Results
All recommendations in the proposal were approved and Blue Seed was engaged to lead the Culture Stream on the program over a 6 month period. Outcomes achieved included:
- Designed and launched the target DNA and supporting leadership and behaviour model for the new Service NSW organisation and people
- Aligned the newly designed values & behaviours to customer service model and customer journey
- Integrated the target customer-centric values & behaviours in all project design and deliverables, across the technology, people and process work streams
- Motivated the role modelling of target state behaviours within the project team and supported them with reinforcing factors
- Co-designed an employee engagement campaign to attract and retain employees to the new SNW entity
- Co-designed a series of culture workshops to be used as part of new team member orientation, induction and ongoing training programs, translating espoused values & behaviours into actual daily behaviours
- Identified key levers for change, enablers for BAU ownership and measures of success
Blue Seed’s consultants were able to quickly integrate with the large consulting firm already engaged on the program and take a position of leadership on the Change Management stream as Culture Lead for the start-up organisation.
Having completed a number of engagements within the NSW Government we have gained valuable experience and exposure to the inner workings of government departments and the culture and dynamics of workforces within them. This afforded us the opportunity to drive real positive change to both the culture and leadership bench strength and our continued engagement through the Service NSW project was evidence of our effectiveness and understanding of what it takes to implement good change within the public sector.
Blue Seed offers a blend of public and private sector approaches that are fit for purpose and deliver results.