The August Team was incredibly lucky to partner with the folks at Pacific Life Insurance over the past 18 months as the organization worked to improve the speed and quality of decision making.
Pacific Life identified decision making as a key area for improvement, but wasn’t sure where to start the change. After employee surveys showed dissatisfaction with the way decisions were made and the layers of bureaucracy, Pacific Life assembled an internal working group to address the challenges. This internal team researched experts in the field and partnered with August to develop a roadmap for change and simple practices for decision making everyone across the organization could use.
Together, we used a multi-pronged approach to scale change across this 3,000 person organization, including:
- Building the capacity of more than 100 internal Champions & Coaches
- Leading live trainings to model practices for hundreds of leaders, project managers, and HR business partners
- Creating a virtual learning course for asynchronous learning and to make it easier for any employee to learn how to improve decision making (in less than 30 minutes!)
- Coaching intact business teams to improve their decision making on a daily and weekly basis through their regular work
- Integrating decision making practices into annual goal setting, initiative planning, development goals, 1-1 meetings, and learning & development throughout the organization
- Documenting stories of impact to drive awareness of and desire for change
As our project lead, Rob Salley, VP of Organizational Effectiveness and Talent Management shared, “Thanks to August’s support our latest survey showed strong improvement in decision making. For the question I’m empowered to make decisions that enable me to do my job effectively, our scores improved 11 points. That’s statistically significant and it shows that the work we’re putting into decision making is making a difference.”
