Transformation & The ECD with James Roberts, Chief Digital Officer, Wellington City Council


How The Emotional Culture Deck Transformed Our Workplace

Four years ago, James started working at the Council and quickly got involved in a big project to change how things were done. But change is hard, and it wasn't going smoothly. The team realized they needed to take a step back and think about what they were doing differently.

This change meant James ended up leading a large group of people who had to work together in a new way. They needed to change the workplace culture, which means how people feel about their work and how they work together. To help with this, James found something called The Emotional Culture Deck.

 

The ECD is a set of cards that help people talk about and understand their feelings at work. Near the end of 2019, James and his team used The ECD for the first time with more than 20 people. It really helped. Everyone who joined felt it was useful. It made them realize that caring about each other's feelings was important and that they should focus more on creating a good place to work.

"It's incredibly effective and powerful in the change it can influence and it's so easy to use and so accessible and because of that kind of a little bit of gamification around the card deck. People are very open to it. So I could say, it has to be one of the first choices I reckon if you're thinking about culture development, how do we better develop you the people that work in the environment, make it a great place to work, et cetera? For me, it'd be, you know, probably top of the list in terms of techniques to use. So I definitely encourage anyone to use it and am more than happy to speak to anyone as well if they want to come and have a chat about our experiences, more than happy too."

James really likes The ECD. He thinks it's a great way for any workplace wanting to improve how people work together and feel about their work. It's easy to use, and because it's a bit like a game, people enjoy it. James says it's one of the best ways to help improve workplace culture.

He's so pleased with the changes that he's happy to talk to anyone who wants to know more about how The ECD helped them. James' experience shows that with the right tools, improving how people feel at work is possible and important.

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Here's what James had to say about his journey with The Emotional Culture Deck:

"When I first started at Council four years ago, I was involved in a transformation program.

My experience with transformation programs is mixed and how often they actually achieve what they aspire to achieve is mixed, because it's so complex and there are so many different moving parts.

In essence, I don't think that at the time we were on track to achieve what we aspired to from that program. So we really had to kind of stop and re-gear and rethink. And as part of that, we did some organisational change as well.

That's when I moved into the role that I'm in now managing a large group of people and so what happened really was a whole bunch of disparate functions came together and needed to operate in quite a different and transformed way.

Part of that, it was almost like kind of stripping down a little bit of the old and recreating a new environment and way of working and culture that we wanted to operate at the same time.

My current boss has a very strong focus on improving the culture and performance of the organization and making it a great place to work as well. So I got a lot of autonomy and support to really work hard on the culture. I came across The ECD and it just seemed like a very simple and effective yet powerful way of influencing culture.

Towards the end of 2019, we did the first set of facilitated sessions which was approximately 20 plus people.

We did that and we got some really good stuff from that. I think everyone who participated there, got a lot of benefits out of it. If nothing else, it cemented the fact that that was important, you know, humans, important for us. And that we felt that building the culture was an important thing to do. We wanted to emphasize it as a priority.

I would definitely advocate using it. Most certainly. I think as I mentioned earlier on, there are a lot of different kind of organizational behavior and management, development and leadership, methodologies and practices and things that you can do and we've all done loads and loads of them.

But this one is, it's incredibly effective and powerful in the change, it can influence and it's so easy to use and so accessible and because of that kind of a little bit of gamification around the card deck, etc.

You know, people are very open to it. So I could say, it has to be one of the first choices I reckon if you're thinking about culture development, how do we better develop you the people that work in the environment, make it a great place to work, et cetera? For me, it'd be, you know, probably top of the list in terms of techniques to use. So I definitely encourage anyone to use it and am more than happy to speak to anyone as well if they want to come and have a chat about our experiences, more than happy too."

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