Podcast: Building organisational culture

Published: October 3, 2024

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An In Good Company podcast with Will Lankston, Managing Director of Timpson Direct

How to live your organisational culture

What is harder… starting a process to transform an organisational culture or sustaining a good organisational culture once you have a reputation for having got it right?

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William Lankston is Managing Director of Timpson Direct, part of the renowned British retail service provider. A family business since 1865, Timpson offer shoe repairs, key cutting and watch repairs and are a mainstay of many high streets. They’re also celebrated for their unique approach to employee welfare, with a tried and tested strategy of hiring ex-offenders and measuring key business metrics around employee happiness. In this episode Will and Dan discuss how they continue to sustain this positive organisational culture, and what we can learn from them.

The importance of employee happiness

We don't measure a huge number of things in our business. Now obviously we're looking at sales. But in general, we are far more focussed on the happiness of our colleagues. At the end of a week, we ask everyone: ‘how are you feeling?’. It’s a simple score out of ten, with space to comment. Managers can then call colleagues and check in. Because not only is that the right thing to do, but we also know that, where we've got happier colleagues, we perform better.

If an area manager has great sales figures and a poor happy index result, the figures are probably going to decline. And equally, we know if we've got an area manager with a fantastic happy index result and perhaps slightly poorer figures, they're probably going to be on the up. Now, it's difficult to prove whether colleagues are happy because we're making more money (bigger bonus) or if (as we believe) the happiness piece comes first and that will generate more profit in the end.

How does organisational culture affect retention?

We consider ourselves to be a service retailer, but if you compare Timpson against most traditional retailers our retention is far superior. And there's a few reasons for that.

We offer lots of on-the-job training.
We offer our colleagues a unique suite of benefits.
We have clear values and a lived culture in the business.

When you combine these things together, I do believe we've created a number of compelling reasons for our colleagues to stay. We could always do better. And it is always a priority for us to do better. But, when we talk about the main challenges that we're facing, colleague retention is not one of them.

Watch / listen to the full episode to find out how Will applies these and other organisational culture principles to the parts of the business that are more web based and therefore less people focussed, how the strategy for employing ex-offenders works in practice and why upside down management is core to business success.

Listen to the podcast on Spotify

Watch our interview here: