Strategy Case Study: BPAY Group

A Company at a Crossroads

Our strategy team began the direction-setting journey with BPAY Group. In early conversations, the BPAY Group leadership team identified a sense that at the level of workplace culture, they needed to enhance their capacity to innovate and collaborate. In a rapidly-evolving industry, this was of more than mere passing concern.

Finding the Right Insights

Our team facilitated a process that included leadership consultation, an ethnographic office study, and a return report with insights and recommended directions. Using a range of tools including our Touchline model, the O.C.A.I. culture analysis questionnaire, and our work-mode placement, we were able to connect the “big aspirations” for their workplace culture to a sophisticated understanding of what was happening on the ground and why.

Setting a Direction with Confidence

Resourced with rich data and powerful insights, the BPAY Group leadership team was well equipped to embrace a clear and confident vision for how they wanted to work in the new office. In particular, they identified higher levels of staff autonomy and office inter-connectedness as a paramount foundation for what, strategically, the company had to achieve to thrive.

Integrating 3 Environmental “Touchlines” with a Shared Vision

BPAY Group’s shared vision was able to inform the design development of what we call “Touchlines” - the three layers of an organisation’s operating environment. It’s only when these three layers are synchronised that true change is likely. In short, the physical environment is necessary but not sufficient:

• The physical touchline
• The information touchline, including technology capability
• The understandings touchline, including conventions & policy

Ongoing Transition Support

So, even as the physical design crystallised and the new office was fitted out, we co-created new initiatives with a BPAY Group action team around the information and organisation touchlines. Training initiatives, tutorial videos, a comms strategy, and a suite of new office ‘habits’ and ‘routines’ worked together to successfully lead BPAY Group staff, one step at a time, to a new and more effective way of working together. Significantly, for BPAY Group this included a shift from fixed-desks to a high flexibility Activity Based Working environment.

A Transformative Move, & Transformed Culture

Talk to BPAY Group now, just 12 months on, and there is universal agreement that a transformation has taken place. As staff recently commented:

• ‘People are showing up early to work’
• ‘Everyone is inviting clients in’
• ‘I’ve spoken more with colleagues in the last 6 weeks than I had in the last 10 years’
• ‘The kitchen is full of buzz’

As BPAY Group looks to execute a business strategy that relies on rich interconnectedness and high levels of staff autonomy, their new environment has become their closest ally. We’re honoured that our workplace strategy team could assist BPAY Group in anchoring exactly the new culture they needed.