Improving Speed & Quality of Decision Making at Pacific Life Insurance

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.

The Challenge:  Bureaucracy Blocking Progress 

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.

The Strategy: Embedding New Practices at Scale

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, asynchronous learning course 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

The Impact: Engaged Employees and Empowered Decisions

As a result of August's multi-pronged approach, Pacific Life significantly improved its decision effectiveness and greatly boosted employee satisfaction with the process.

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.

-Rob Salley, VP of Organizational Effectiveness and Talent Management, Pacific Life

August and Pacific Life: Creating Lasting Impact Through Multi-Pronged Change

Transforming a process like decision making, which touches every employee, leader and operation within the organization, required a multi-pronged strategy. We targeted decision-making practices and mindsets throughout the organization via leadership coaching, self-guided education, embedding with teams and town halls, and partnering with organization's communication channels to capture and disseminate the story of the transformation as it unfolded. These efforts built energy and momentum from the top down, the bottom up, and the inside out.

August's work with Pacific Life has had a lasting impact that continues to reverberate to this day. As Pacific Life has continued to evolve as an organization, the self-guided resources we left in place continue to train and empower new employees to integrate the organization's decision-making practices into their daily work. In this way, August has helped Pacific Life achieve positive change that will outlast the tenure of any individual, and shape the culture of the organization itself. We are proud of this collaboration, as a living example of the power of multidimensional change.