Case Study: Bendigo and Adelaide Bank tracks its cultural personality

Employee sentiment surveys are one way for businesses to grasp the successes and failures of their corporate culture.

Digital Nation Australia spoke to Dee Monaghan, head of culture, engagement and behavioural risk and Bendigo and Adelaide Bank to understand the bank’s investment in its company culture after conducting a review with PwC.

According to Monaghan, “Culture is a real differentiator for the bank, but they didn't quite understand why. So what was it that made it different? What was it that made it special?”

In 2019 the bank partnered with PwC, where Monaghan was a director and consultant at the time, to undertake ethonographic research to better understand the bank’s cultural personality.

This was done in order to better understand the risks and challenges that the bank’s cultural traits pose, as well as points of difference that set Bendigo apart.

The report revealed that a focus on relationships was one of the cultural traits inherent to the bank, said Monaghan.

She believes that this is one of the factors involved in the bank’s resilience in the last two years.

One of the actions that Bendigo took as a result of the report was to partner with Qualtrics in order to generate more dynamic insights from employee engagement surveys.

“We went to market looking for a partner who would be able to help us with a system that would enable that leader led approach in that self-serve model. And what we've been able to create in partnership with Qualtrics is a 12 month employee experience insight approach where we've got two bi-annual assessments of our employee experience, we then have ad hoc assessments based on some key pertinent issues that are happening for the business,” said Monaghan.

Some of these surveys studied employee wellbeing, others considered sentiment around vaccination and return to work policies.

“The platform has been a huge enabler of getting insights to our people in a very quick way.”

Prior to the platform, manual surveys would take months to gather data, whereas with Qualtrics the bank can gather insights from 1700 employees between nine and 10 says, she said.

The investment in Qualtrics is part of the Bendigo and Adelaide Bank’s broader transformation agenda, and Monaghan notes that the organisation is seeking to simplify its systems and processes.