Asset owners, managers recommended to develop culture dashboards

Arga Dwi Ihsanul

Tuesday, Jul 07, 2020 | 07:43 pm

Dashboard Management

News24xx.com - Asset managers and asset owners should monitor and report on the “cultural condition” of their organisations via a dashboard, as one tangible action to advance cultural change in their organisations, according to the Thinking Ahead Institute (TAI).

Linked to Willis Towers Watson, the investment research group said that appreciation of the value of effective organisational purpose and culture had grown considerably in the investment industry in the last five years, but there was still considerable need for cultural improvement.

In a new paper, it set out a model “culture dashboard”, with metrics across 10 dimensions of culture, ranging from client-centric and people-centric elements and leadership attributes to sources of competitive edge such as innovation, and diversity and inclusion.

Rather than being only for internal use, TAI said the dashboard should be communicated to stakeholders.

Roger Urwin, co-founder of TAI, said: “We measure what we do because we can. But we can measure more than the activities we currently do.

“The Institute’s culture model and dashboard represent an attempt to capture a source of considerable comparative advantage for those who recognise the value in measuring culture as a step in the path of cultural improvement.”

In addition to creating a “culture dashboard,” TAI recommended that asset owners and asset managers:

Develop a unique organisational purpose to define client value and grow stakeholder trust;
Create a common language and fact base for culture and have an aspirational target culture;
Use incentive compensation to align culture; and
Add C-suite culture and talent officers to drive cultural change.
On the topic of the client value proposition, TAI said it needed to be communicated clearly and authentically: “institutional investors need to express in accurate and realistic terms what their clients and stakeholders should expect in performance and service”.

The new paper from TAI is an update on research presented in its 2015 paper on ‘The Impacts of Culture on Institutional Investors’. Asset owners such as British Airways Pensions, BT Pension Scheme, and New Zealand Super Fund provided input as culture “exemplars”.

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