How do we accelerate cultural change during significant business transformation, including the shift from working from home to transition to working from the office?
This is the “icare challenge” presented to more than 400 undergraduate Business School students in their core management subject: Management Skills, this semester.
As the largest insurance group in Australia with a $90 billion turn-over, and employing close to 1,800 staff, icare is a genuinely complex business. In the midst of their commitment to create a workplace dedicated to caring for the people of NSW, building trust, confidence and thriving in their communities, the global pandemic hit. Like many organisations, icare is emerging from this period.
Management Skills students are in a good position to provide fresh perspectives and ideas to meet this challenge! Based on concepts of “cultivating individual and organisational flourishing”, and “optimal functioning” drawn from Positive Organisational Scholarship (POS) theory, student groups applied topics such as organisational compassion, workplace well-being, resilience and optimism to the challenge. The students work was then judged by icare General Managers for Culture and Capability, Workplace and Wellbeing and Strategy, Governance and Operations resulting in four winning teams who were recognised with the inaugural “icare-UTS Industry Partnership Award” this week.
In presenting the awards, icare’s Group Executive People and Culture, Amanda-Lea Smith said: “we were particularly interested in presentations that explained theory and could be implemented, with immediate impact, to help us with our Gather Together challenge. Some of your ideas are already being implemented … we also learned a lot about what a future workforce was looking for in their workplaces.”
Students also found the opportunity highly valuable:
I feel the partnership provides more meaning and context to the work that we're doing. I felt like there's more personal commitment to it. We felt motivated to produce strategies that are really beneficial for the organization to help solve the challenge that they're facing. Because it's such a real-life challenge that really needs to be solved.
The catalyst for the partnership between icare and the Business School was Dr Isabelle Phillips: ‘I have worked with icare on culture and leadership effectiveness since 2015. icare delivers incredibly important services to Australian workers and does so in a complex context. Their aspirations for healthy work environments and flourishing workplace cultures for their own workers and for all employers in NSW is intrinsically linked to their core business of insuring worker safety. Through this partnership project icare have gifted business transparency to our students. The students of the subject management skills have experienced excellent engagement working on this real case. It has been a delight to bring together UTS and my client icare to create additional value for all.”
Subject Coordinator Dr Rosemary Sainty identified many benefits from the partnership - from providing a quality work integrated learning experience for the students, to supporting the Business School’s Strategic Positioning, in particular its principle of contributing to the public good – “helping businesses and organisations make better decisions to promote economic and social wellbeing.” The partnership also supports UTS’ commitment to the UN Sustainable Development Goals SDG 3 (Wellbeing) and 17 (Partnerships).
To learn more about Positive Organisational Scholarship (POS), check out its Australian Community of Practice, hosted by the Business School.
Rosemary Sainty, Lecturer, University of Technology Sydney