About
Polpharma Group is one of the leading healthcare companies in Central and Eastern Europe, the Commonwealth of Independent States, and Central Asia. They are focused on delivering high-quality and affordable pharmaceuticals, manufacturing a broad range of prescription and non-prescription consumer healthcare products.
Their four strategic priorities were created to enable their organisational vision to continuously outgrow the healthcare market as a focused, innovative and efficient team. ‘Culture as accelerator’ is one of these priorities. They define this as ‘leading an organisational wide cultural transformation programme to further develop company culture in line with their vision and to develop and retain talent’.
The board asked Impact Polska to work with both their senior team and the wider organisation to lead a company-wide, global culture change initiative programme.
Polpharma Group’s organisational vision is to continuously outgrow the healthcare market as a focused, innovative and efficient team. They have four strategic priorities designed to enable this vision, one of which is ‘culture as accelerator’.
The board of Polpharma Group asked Impact Polska to lead a culture reshape initiative, working in close partnership with their 15-person senior team and actively involving and engaging the wider organisation in the process. The change initiative aimed to further develop company culture in line with their vision and support talent development and retention across its global footprint.
To be successful the culture reshape programme needed to deliver:
An agreed set of cultural values that were listed in a well-organised model with behaviours assigned to each value. These needed to be created with the involvement of Polpharma Group employees and exist alongside a plan for senior sponsorship and organisational implementation.
Polpharma Group recognised that the success of their culture change hinged on creating a set of cultural values that were aligned to their organisational vision but were understood and owned by their employees. To ensure this outcome, Impact Polska worked with the senior team on a programme that included:
- Setting cultural direction: a series of workshops and 1:1 sessions were held with the senior team. These explored their views on the direction the company-wide culture change should take, how they can act as role models, and determining key priorities.
- Co-creating culture: A representative sample of Polpharma Group global employees were invited to become change agents for the culture change. They joined a half-day workshop to explore their organisational vision and strategic objectives, before completing the ValueMatch survey.
- ValueMatch survey: ValueMatch is an online assessment tool that measures the dynamics between people and their workplace, providing a unique perspective on how to make an organisation function better. The senior team along with 7% of the 7500+ strong global employees completed a ValueMatch survey which was then analysed by certified Impact consultants and the results shared with the senior team.
- Reshaping culture: Impact led two workshops for the senior team, summarising the ValueMatch results and recommendations and exploring the recommended values and behaviours. The second stage resulted in a final decision on the new set of values and an agreement on how the senior team would lead the influencers group, engage the organisation, and implement the values.
Following the senior team workshops, Impact successfully handed over ownership of the culture change initiative to Polpharma Group. Employees from across the organisation were interviewed one year after the programme, with 83% stating that they have noticed positive changes since the values were implemented.