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:
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
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.