Winning behaviours: Inside FSP's blueprint for organisational success

What are the attitudes and behaviours that are fundamental to prosperous and productive teams?

Best Companies' CEO, Jonathan Austin, invited Simon Grosse, CEO of 3-Star Accredited technology consultancy FSP, to divulge the secrets behind how his organisation cultivated a World-Class culture through clear communication, employee-owned values, and winning behaviours.

The One FSP Playbook

Simon and his team have created the ‘FSP Playbook’ which encompasses the values and culture of the business and provides a template of the behaviours required for individuals and the company to achieve success. Watch the video further down this article to hear more about how this strategy has ensured that all people at FSP are working towards the same vision.

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Where did the initial idea to develop the One FSP playbook come from?

“The first thing to mention is, with the FSP playbook, every single word is written by us. It's really important during the process of creating your structure, and this is basically a culture playbook: it's our cultural DNA. Where it started was getting the leadership team together, basically saying, when you're doing your best work, what does that look like?  And then conversely, when you're not so good, what does that look and feel like?”

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And how long did it take to develop? 

“Over the course of three monthly leadership workshops, we built up the picture of what does great look like, what does not great look like. And then focus in on the characteristics that formed our 14 winning behaviours. What you're saying is these are things that we find deeply important. Really pulling together purpose, values and principles; a high-level view of performance and our full team winning behaviours is what exists in our book.”

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How did you engage with investors? Did you have some pushback initially or did people understand that this was the route to further success?

“The benefit of having something that's going to bring absolute clarity to the organisation is intangible. What I told them was that we're going to come up with a playbook. It's going to bring clarity. This can be great for retention. We're going to have a great deliverable that's going to really stand us out as being a world class workplace. It's a no brainer.”

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How did you seed it with colleagues and how did you get them involved?

“We do a kick off every January and we said one of our commitments around continuing to be a world class culture is that we want to involve everybody around creating this One FSP Playbook. We ran the leadership workshops in January, February, March. Then we went through a feedback cycle during Q2. The benefit of doing that was everybody felt a sense of ownership, everybody felt part of it, or, at least, everybody had the opportunity to be part of that and to feel some sense of ownership.”

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How do you ensure new employees buy into your culture?

“Every new starter is invited to a culture and playbook session. Every single person we interview has either looked at the resources that we have available on the website or, if they haven't, we're saying that this is a really good qualifier for you. This is what life is like here. Does that resonate for you and what would you bring to that?”

What have you done to make sure that the Playbook keeps evolving?

“We've appointed a programme lead internally and he set up 15 different sessions in different teams, in different regions. Every single country covered, every single office covered, and ran a workshop for every single person in the organisation. And we need to do another release of the book this year as well.”

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What improvements have you've seen since the playbook was launched?

“Probably the strongest change is the responsibility that's been taken across the business for holding the standard of excellence. And I've seen more positively challenging conversations between leaders and in the organisation. That's basically meant we've had a higher bar for how we're going to behave.”

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Did you have any challenges around specific behaviours for individuals or teams?

“Everybody in the company must live the One FSP Playbook. But, for example, if you're in our cybersecurity team, they've got 2 or 3 winning behaviours that are very specific. For example, if there's a client response that happens on a Saturday afternoon, there's a different way that would be specific to their discipline.”

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Is there anything you would do differently?  

“I generally want to get things done quickly because then you get momentum and good engagement from people. It took us six months to get that done from beginning to end, and the reason we ended up doing it at the end of June is because I told everybody, we'll have it done by half-year. So, what would have been maybe a little bit better, would be setting some expectation that it might take an extra three months. I think a lot of it is about knowing what you're letting yourself in for. I wasn't expecting the level of engagement and the level of feedback that we got, but that was very positive.”

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Best Companies' Community Event highlighted FSP's innovative approach to building a future-ready workforce through its unique "Playbook" of winning behaviours.  

Discover how Best Companies’ can help your company achieve similar success by understanding the effectiveness of your engagement strategies and uniting your people behind a shared vision and values through organisational clarity. Get in touch today.

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