Industry: Veterinary, Not-for-Profit

Service area: Culture

Lort Smith is Australia’s largest not-for-profit animal hospital, supporting Melbourne and Victorian pets and their owners since 1936. With an unwavering commitment to providing veterinary care to animals in need, Lort Smith has helped shape the landscape of pet welfare in Melbourne. Lort Smith staff and volunteers strive every day to be the animal hospital all of Melbourne truly admires and is proud of.

Having undergone significant leadership, operational and structural changes as well as a significant capital works program and the Covid-19 pandemic Lort Smith engaged Spring Point to assess and develop an understanding of the organisation’s current culture, define the aspired organisational culture required to ensure alignment with strategy and performance objectives, and define activities that will support the development of a roadmap to help inform and implement strategy, and strengthen the organisational culture.

What We Did

• Leveraging our PerformX Culture Diagnostic we quickly deployed the online PerformX culture survey to Lort Smith’s 175 employees – achieving a 70% completion rate in just two weeks.
• We then produced a series of culture reports for leaders and teams with a focus on linking culture to perofrmance using our PerformX framework
• We conducted a series of 10 in-depth interviews with leaders to understand and prioritise the organisations strategic and performance objectives to inform our Culture Blueprinting process.
• We successfully facilitated nine, team based culture assessment debriefing and action planning sessions with over 90 staff in North Melbourne and Campbellfield to overview results and draft organisational and team culture action plans.
• Finally, we developed and presented a comprehensive board report including the survey results, culture blueprint and action plan to the Lort Smith board.

Diring our time we spent several days with the Lort Smith team to deep dive into their culture and strategic priorities and develop an understanding of the key drivers to improve both culture and performance. The total time ealpsed between project kick-off and final board reporting was four months.

Outcome

This initial culture assessment and planning work has enabled Lort Smith to align their culture priorities with their strategic planning and performance activities for the next 12-24 months including their action plan and culture assessment metrics. It’s also provided the entire Lort Smith team with the opportunity to contribute to the culture roadmap design and understand the critical culture drivers within the organisation.