Background
Snowy Hydro Limited operates the Snowy Mountains Scheme, an integrated water and hydroelectric power project located in Australia’s Southern Alps. It provides renewable energy and energy-related products and manages critical water flows. It is also involved in implementing a range of environmental and community initiatives.
Challenge
As the organisation emerged from a semi–government business, it needed to shed its ‘silo thinking’ and embrace a culture of innovation where proactive behaviour was encouraged. Although senior leaders had a clear vision of the organisation, the larger workforce of 400 employees did not share or have a sound understanding of the direction of the business.
Experience
We worked closely with our client to help identify the existing culture and the preferred culture and how it linked to organisational strategy, leadership effectiveness and performance.
- We took an ‘inside-out’ approach, guiding individuals across the entire organization through a process of personal discovery and goal alignment. We then helped them to apply similar principles to their own leadership and organizational development.
- We helped build vision and belief within the leadership team and ensured they could commit to, as well as lead, culture change.
- We measured current and desired culture to articulate what individuals needed to do in order to support the new culture.
- We assisted the senior management group to articulate the challenges, priorities and solutions, generating a sense of unity and enthusiasm for the changes. We implemented 360-degree feedback to gain self awareness about how their leadership style was affecting culture and what could be done to improve it.
The client subsequently rolled these tools out to all employees. The aim was to help empower and support work teams by identifying and reducing barriers to high performance. We helped foster a “Team Snowy” ethos by providing an environment for sharing ideas, learning to build self–efficacy and accountability towards achieving a shared organisational vision.
Outcome
Delivering measurable benefits: partnering with The Pacific Institute was the right choice.
Over the 10-years (2003 to 2013) that The Pacific Institute has worked with Snowy Hydro, the following measurable benefits have been realized:
Performance
- 8% year-on-year growth in earnings.
- Neither performance nor environment impacted by one-in-500-year fire, one-in-500-year drought and one-in-500-year water inflow.
Culture
- 42% improvement in The Pacific Institute Cultural Index.
- Largest improvements resulted from increasing achievement (18%), self-actualising (30%) and humanistic (26%) (HSI constructive behaviours) and reducing conventional (20%) and dependent (22%) (HSI passive behaviours).
- Zero days lost to industrial relations issues over 10 years
Safety
- Lost Time Injuries reduced from 22 per year to 0.5 per year.
“The Pacific Institute has helped us transition to a forward-focused, flexible, performance-oriented culture and to achieve the mindsets within our business that were essential to our evolution of business strategy.
They helped us achieve a shift in accountabilities and processes that allowed us to look for opportunities for continuous improvement which lead to substantial increases in our effectiveness.”
- Terry Charlton, CEO