How Mosaic Multicultural Connections enhanced performance and uplifted the capability of their people
Often when a team is perceived to be underperforming, there is a view that they need skills training. But often they don’t. They need role clarity, clear expectations, better access to systems, documented process, more information about the services the organisation provides and better relationships with their key stakeholders. This is what a true Capability Uplift Program includes.
For more than 40 years, Mosaic Multicultural Connections (Mosaic) has supported culturally diverse individuals and communities across Newcastle and the Hunter, Lake Macquarie, Central Coast, New England, and North West regions to overcome barriers and thrive. With over 100 employees, the Mosaic team proudly assists people from migrant, refugee, and multicultural backgrounds, and communities through its Aged Care, Settlement, Family, and Youth Services.
Mosaic understands that to serve its community best, its employees need to feel supported with the knowledge, skills, and tools required to succeed in their roles. Mosaic engaged Jacky Morgan to explore current challenges and help uplift the capability of key employees.
To understand the business expectations and desired deliverables, Jacky spent time with each leader within the team. She met with employees to find out whether they felt anything was impacting their ability to do their role well; unpacking any current frustrations and gathering ideas for improvement.
Overall, she met with over 15 stakeholders in positive and solution-oriented discussions to unpack current challenges and generate potential approaches, discovering:
- Lack of role clarity and confusion over responsibilities resulting in unmet expectations.
- An opportunity to leverage the new business strategy to lift the service delivery model.
- Inconsistent access to systems was impacting delivery of business outcomes.
- Challenges with the flow of information and regularity of communication.
- Lack of knowledge of the organisation’s products, services, and processes.
From initial conversations, a hypothesis that perhaps training around a particular set of skills would resolve the issues being experienced was identified.
“Mosaic Multicultural Connections play a vital role in supporting its communities to thrive, so it's important for our team to be collaborating and leaning on each other to do their best work. When we started to feel friction in our employee's experience and knew we could be doing more to support them, we reached out to Jacky Morgan for her people expertise to help us unpack our challenges. Her ability to engage with individuals to uncover what was most important to them, build trust, and make them feel heard was extraordinary"
Andrew Tuck - Executive Officer
Post conversations with key employees, Jacky analysed the business unit’s internal processes and procedures, reviewed their templates and tools, and met with key stakeholders to explore ways to increase knowledge, streamline communication, and support collaboration between business units.
A report with detailed insights and recommendations was then presented to the Mosaic Leadership team to determine priorities and next steps.
Six custom workshops were designed and facilitated, involving different business units to:
- Co-create a set of customer service principles aligned with Mosaics’ business strategy.
- Identify key strengths at an individual and team level to enhance the shared culture.
- Build a “Responsibilities Matrix” documenting who did what, why, and when to provide greater transparency to all employees, identify unnecessary processes, and allow for development plans to be created to avoid key person dependencies.
- Co-design and co-facilitate a set of training sessions with subject matter experts from both the Aged Care, Settlements, and Community departments to build a broader understanding of client needs, as well as program processes and priorities.
- Develop a range of ‘how to’ cheat sheets focused on team-identified challenge areas to build clarity, capability, and confidence.
“Working with Jacky has allowed us to realign as a team, and ensure our systems and processes are supporting our team to focus on what we do best – supporting our communities. There is just something about working with Jacky. She has a way of creating a safe space to help people to unpack their roadblocks, and move forward constructively. She brings smiles to people's faces.”
Andrew Tuck, Executive Officer
Since partnering with Jacky, the Mosaic team has been able to support their employees to optimise their performance and build greater capability to support their clients.
Employees said they had gained ‘greater clarity on the priorities of their stakeholders and the responsibilities of their role’, and now felt they ‘had more knowledge and essential information to help them better meet client and business expectations’.
Leaders said the project was ‘wonderfully collaborative’ and had ‘successfully delved deeply into the conflicting expectations and activities’ of the different teams, allowing for a more consistent approach to working together and the space for more open sharing of key information.
Stakeholders said the teams now had a ‘better understanding of what good internal customer service looks like and how to effectively deliver it’ and they were looking forward to regular feedback sessions together. “It feels like the team seems more relaxed and focused and we are now working together better to uplift the organisation as a whole.”
Jacky Morgan’s unique capacity to confidently engage stakeholders, discover the root causes, coach leaders, communicate concepts, design strategies and facilitate change makes her a highly valuable consultant for any organisation seeking to create a successful and sustainable team.