Culture and purpose drive business outcomes: Apollo Care CEO

A strong alignment between brand purpose and company culture is necessary to streamline operations and encourage key behaviours.

Digital Nation spoke to Stephen Becsi, CEO of aged care provider Apollo Care, who said, “There's real unity between purpose, behaviours, and the summation of behaviours, which is your culture and the business KPIs. You can't separate them they're actually one big marriage."

He made his comments in a Digital Nation Australia mini-documentary.

Becsi believes that identifying the purpose of the organisation and the key behaviours that staff can demonstrate to work towards this purpose is crucial to a business’ success. 

Kate Phillips, VP global marketing at Criteria Corp, interviewed for the same documentary echoed this view expressing the importance of consistency throughout the organisation.

“For me brand purpose has to live and breathe throughout the organisation and has to be what people understand and recognise you for,” she says.

“Each of your interactions needs to relay that, whether that's your marketing messages, whether that's your customer journeys, whether people that's people's experience with your product or service, right down to their experience as an employee each day in your organisation.”

Having recently undergone the process of defining the company’s core purpose, Apollo Care established four key behaviours that Besci believes will lead to the purpose being successfully deployed within the organisation.

“Being a new organisation, we had to really think hard about what the purpose of the organisation was when we came up with an effective one liner, which was supporting older Australians to live their way with grace and dignity,” he says.

“It's a short sentence, but it's extremely powerful…Having staff then demonstrate whatever it is that they need to do to allow Australians to live their way with grace and dignity, you have to capture that correctly. And for us, we had four behaviours which summarise that culture piece.”

The behaviours include putting residents first, focusing on safety and quality, working together for collective achievement and treating the business' money like one's own.

Defining the company’s purpose was a process that Apollo Care outsourced to the workplace culture consultancy Appellon, where Becsi is a non-executive director.

However, Besci cautions simply coming up with a clever one-liner that does not honestly depict the business proposition.

“If your advertising or marketing is not in alignment with what your purpose is, people begin to doubt. I think consumers are going to see through it if you haven't got that purpose correct, and advertising against what the real purpose is, people begin to question and you eventually get caught out.”

“It's becoming more and more real, and more and more people are going to challenge what the real purpose of an organisation is.”

Credit: The video was produced by Josh Lundberg and Matthew Ryan.