Moore Barlow
Utilising culture assessment to unify an organisation post-merger
Moore Barlow is a mid-sized law firm, based in the South East of England. Over the past 5 years they have experienced a significant amount of change from a merger, restructure and technology integration. They offer many legal services and aim to provide a high standard of legal support with a local, community feel and focus on client relationships.
The Challenge
Following these organisational changes, Moore Barlow wished to understand the current state of its organisational culture, its strengths, tensions and opportunities for improvement.
Dragonfish worked alongside Moore Barlow in 2020, post-merger, to co-create their values and behaviours, and 5 years on, they wanted to understand a) which strengths and areas of opportunity had been sustained and b) whether the values had remained relevant for the organisation, driving a high-performance culture.
In order to explore these questions they enlisted the support of dragonfish and our culture diagnostic solution, 'Lumin'.
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A 2-step Lumin solution
Our approach began with the identification of initial areas of curiosity through a desktop review of publicly available and internal information, data and insights. These areas of curiosity opened the conversation around culture and highlighted key questions to explore throughout the assessment process.
The culture survey gave insight as to the experience of colleagues using the dragonfish proprietary research question set, plus a series of bespoke qualitative questions, co-designed with Moore Barlow stakeholders.
These activities uncovered the organisational culture strengths and opportunities, as well as tensions between the two. The resulting insights provided areas for exploration within the focus groups, carried out with a cross section of colleagues from across the organisation.
The focus groups, along with data gathered through all stages of the process, determined the key culture priorities for Moore Barlow, as well their culture blockers/ root causes. When flipped to become a desired culture attribute, these root causes provided solution opportunities for Moore Barlow to build into a culture strengthening action plan. For instance, when reframing the root cause of ‘financial performance drives conversation’ to a desired culture where ‘customer impact drives conversation’, solutions such as increasing leadership connection to customer, become more evident and meaningful.
The Immediate Impact of Lumin
The final output of the project with Moore Barlow was a culture diagnostic report and leadership briefing, detailing the findings of the assessment and recommendations for next steps. These outputs provided Moore Barlow with;
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Culture scores which could be used as an internal benchmark for future assessments
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Culture strengths and opportunities, which were also compared to the strengths and opportunities highlighted in our 2020 assessment
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A comparison between Moore Barlow’s culture results and our high-performance benchmark (also used to assess internal strengths and opportunities)
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Culture root causes- areas to be addressed that would lead to meaningful culture change
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Culture priorities and solutions built from the root causes, to determine the shifts required to become a more unified, effective and customer-centric organisation
Due to the engagement of a key senior sponsor, supported by the wider leadership team, this project highlighted the optimal cadence and engagement from senior leaders within the programme of activity. We also tested the use of accompanying technologies, such as AI assisted desktop immersion and PowerBI data dashboards, finding them to be extremely beneficial to our approach and impact.
The sustained impact of Lumin
Three months post engagement, we caught up with Moore Barlow to find out the impact of the Lumin Culture Diagnostic. They are steadily taking forward the recommendations, consulting with the whole organisation to instigate positive culture change, including re- energising colleagues around the organisation’s vision and purpose and connecting all teams with their role in achieving the organisational goals for the next 12 months. Attrition has also decreased as a result of focusing on core items that matter most to people. This is just the start of the journey for Moore Barlow but they are excited about strengthening their culture further over the coming months.
“I have been passionate about creating a sustainable, inclusive and empowering Moore Barlow culture for a long time, working alongside dragonfish in 2020 to articulate our values and behaviours. It was useful to step back and assess them after so much change, exploring where we are doing well and where we still need to improve.
Our organisation and the legal sector are complex for those not working within them everyday, but dragonfish worked hard to understand our uniqueness and this shone through in the insights they provided. We felt they had listened, understood and appreciated our strengths and challenges. It would have been easy for them to take a broad brush approach and compare us to any other organisation, but instead, they truly tailored their findings, insights and conclusions to us.”
Trevor Sterling, Senior Partner
Moore Barlow
“We thoroughly enjoyed our experience as a Lumin early innovator. It was great to test out this new and exciting offering for our culture assessment. Dragonfish made the process easy to engage with and it was really interesting to see the insights unfold as they gathered data from different activities. We felt supported and guided throughout the experience, and found the openness to discovery refreshing. Often we can be too guided by the perceived problem, that we miss key opportunities, but the Lumin solution and dragonfish team operated as a neutral, third-party, happily exploring where the data led, ultimately showing us things we had been unable to see before.”
James O'Loughlin, People Director
Moore Barlow