SLQ Sports Leaders – Culture Case Study

Challenging perceptions of teams and a predisposition to focus on negative outcomes.

INTRODUCTION

Sports Leaders SLQ is an accredited Awarding Organisation, regulated across the UK by OFQUAL, Qualifications Wales, SCQF and CCEA. They offer a suite of nationally recognised qualifications and awards that develop tutors to equip young people with leadership skills for life.

Sports Leaders employ around 40 people working with approximately 1800 schools, colleges, and community organisations throughout the UK.

Richard Norman CEO joined the business 8 years ago, with the initial task of stabilising the organisation following a period of turbulence. Richard’s long-term objective was to change the overall company culture to be more dynamic, representative, and diverse, promoting psychological safety and improving innovation to better respond to young people’s current and future needs.

Pre-Covid SLQ Sports Leaders recognised they needed to do more to enhance its culture and find better ways to promote work-life balance. However, the pandemic had other ideas. As with most businesses, Sports Leaders went into survival mode, quickly adapting to new ways of working and pivoting its delivery to support schools, which due to lockdowns, were closed with students now being home-schooled.

One of the biggest challenges the business experienced was keeping team members engaged and informed – they needed to recreate those very much-needed ‘water cooler moments’ within virtual environments, providing opportunities for social interactions to take place and for people to reconnect.

Post-Covid, the need for a culture transformation was even greater, with the organisation further investing in innovation and, responding to team preferences, committed to a 100% home-based workforce, up from circa 50% pre-covid.

Throughout Sports Leaders Covid-response strategy, focusing and investing in their cultural identity has been integral to its success by supporting their survival & recovery objectives, as well as returning their attention to growth and evolution in 2023 and beyond.

OBJECTIVES

• Putting Culture at the forefront, creating a high performing workforce and organisation that supports and develops its people
• Connect with their workforce to understand how everyone is doing
• Identify skills gaps and needs across teams
• Use results to scope what changes the business needs to make
• Create a series of collective training interventions to move everyone forward and join up the dots
• Understand what impact interventions are having both short and long term
• Improve the company offering and environment for their workforce
• Improve employee data capture

WHY SPORTS LEADERS CHOSE HIREGAINS

We wanted to bring greater objectivity to how we understood culture. We wanted to move away from internal surveys to improve credibility and transparency with our teams and provide a basis for democratising cultural solutions and initiatives.

We looked at a range of solutions to support this cultural transformation, but few seemed able to pinpoint our pain points, as well as highlight where we were getting it right. Through a board member, we were introduced to HireGains which offered us the perfect solution.

HireGains sports background showed they understood performance and well-being. The HireGains solution was easy to use, intuitive and highly insightful. 

Their psychometric approach is effective and the results from the platform continue to provide a huge ‘wow’ moment and keep us focused on areas we may not have identified without HireGains.

The team at HireGains are friendly, engaging, and knowledgeable and couldn’t do enough to help us.

To ensure their Culture is constantly evolving, Sports Leaders are already planning their next Culture Health Check for December 2022.

SOLUTION

Using the HireGains Culture platform to send a series of Culture Health Checks at regular intervals to measure…

• How employee behaviours and values are guiding action
• Levels of focus and effort together with fatigue and burnout risks
• Employee views, attitudes, and perceptions of the organisation
• How culture is driving/hindering performance

A recommendation was made to space the Culture Health Checks 6 months apart. The first of which went live in December 2021, followed by a second in June 2022.

To ensure their Culture is constantly evolving, Sports Leaders are already planning their next Culture Health Check for December 2022.

HOW SPORTS LEADERS USE THE CULTURE HEALTH CHECKS

After the first CHC was completed, Sports Leaders were able to understand the business’s strengths & risks at a departmental level and benchmark themselves against other organisations for use as an internal barometer.

They started making improvements to their workforce development plans, focussing on how they could put more support in place for shared learning experiences and introduced a new app to help develop skills.

In addition to this, the business identified they needed to provide more support for mental health and fitness. Therefore, they invested in other platforms to improve people’s mental well-being, strike the right work-life balance, and help teams find purpose in their work as well as private healthcare that rewards healthy, active lifestyles.

Richard Norman commented “Working with HireGains helped people feel confident they could be honest in their feedback increasing our response rate and giving us a clear picture of what is actually happening, which often challenges our perception. We’d previously tried running our own surveys but there were understandable concerns over anonymity.

Being able to take the outputs from the Culture Health Checks and discuss them internally in an objective manner, then enabled us to be more inclusive and transparent with our managers and workforce about solutions.

I was quite surprised how much movement there was in the business in just 6 months, it made a really positive impact as people could see the changes being made in the business.”

RESULTS

The Culture Health Checks highlighted that overall, the business was doing a lot of things right and their workforce was more engaged than they thought.

Despite the disruption Covid brought about and the new ways of working Sports Leaders rapidly adopted, the initial Health Check affirmed how resilient and engaged their workforce really are while also challenging perceptions of the leadership team on cultural areas for improvement.

The interventions that were put in place for the different groups have been both effective and specific, resulting in increased staffing levels whilst still maintaining a vibrant culture that is driving performance-focused results.

Richard commented “The results were positive, and I was amazed to see we were doing a better job than we gave ourselves credit for. The Health Check gave us an objective feeling that we’ve made gains, rather than just highlighting risks.

It challenged our perceptions of teams and our predisposition to focus on negative outcomes instead of the overarching results, which were showing us that the business is doing well. Especially when we benchmarked our employee engagement levels and made parallels against external organisations, this helped us to understand what good looks like and gave us the assurance we needed. If we didn’t have the HireGains Culture Health Check, we would have based our interventions on gutfeel and possibly focused time, effort, and resource in the wrong areas.

As a leadership team, we’ve changed where our time is focused, we give people the breathing space they need to crack on and instead focus on where we need to support them.

Democratising our solutions also enabled us to take a more holistic approach to problem-solving, rather than being driven from the top down. We formed a ‘culture and skills’ working group where we discuss the Health Check results and continuously assess our culture interventions to drive solutions and improvements from the ground up.”