Evolving our Culture: CulturePsych
At Retail Prodigy Group (RPG), our Purpose is to provide the Ultimate Customer Experience. We partner with three amazing Global brands – NIKE, SAMSUNG and TOMS, committed to elevating the retail experience to ensure the customer experience is Premium at every level. We have approximately 1000 employees across Australia and New Zealand.
When we started RPG ten years ago, we developed a blueprint to ensure that every team member understands the company's purpose and the values and fundamentals that underpin it. We were confident that in doing this, we would create and build a customer centred and results orientated culture.
Although we thought we had a pretty good grasp of the culture, we decided to seek an independent assessment to check that we were on track. We knew that this couldn't be achieved via an engagement survey alone.
We partnered with a business called CulturePsych. Their unique approach enabled our people to tell us what it is really like to work for us and describe the processes, practices and behaviours they experience on a daily basis.
For our first culture survey, we were pleasantly surprised that the participation rate was over 50%, particularly with the majority of our team being employed on a casual basis in stores. This was coupled with thousands of specific examples and comments. The survey was conducted across all parts of the business which enabled us to gain an understanding of the various sub-cultures between roles, brands, functions and regions. The survey produced both quantitative and qualitative data.
At a high level, the overview confirmed our view that we have primarily built a "customer focused" culture. However, we were pleasantly surprised that our strongest cultural attribute "people first" was described as supportive, caring and friendly, as we feel we have a lot of room for improvement. One of the key areas for opportunity and improvement is the "performance" cultural attribute. We have some tension in the areas of results-focus, competitiveness and accountability highlighted within various cohort. This overview was coupled with an ability to drill right down to understand the experiences and behaviours of our people in the detail we craved. This allowed us to identify where we were executing well and how that insight could be used to help other areas of our business. Further insights and ideas were gained from the various focus group sessions covering a cross section of roles within our stores and support office.
The data collection process, accompanied by CulturePsych's extensive organisational expertise, was quick and easy and the analysis provided a deeply insightful picture of our culture. The CulturePsych team then provided recommendations that were pragmatic, easy to action and impactful.
We now firmly believe that to create the Ultimate Customer Experience, it is imperative to nurture a People First culture. We now have a solid roadmap that builds on our existing culture's strengths to turbo charge our journey to achieving our cultural and commercial goals.
Stephen Younane (Co-Founder/CEO) commented,"I am proud of the results, reflective of the work of many people over the past ten years but we have much more work to do to improve our culture. I am so pleased that we discovered Culture Psych. With the extensive experience and expertise of Craig and Maree, RPG has been able to build a Culture Initiatives roadmap to strengthen our Culture and ideally position RPG as a talent magnet. It's been a pleasure to work and partner with the team at Culture Psych".