CHANGE CULTURE
The “future of work” opportunity
The future of work is top of mind for organisations worldwide. Frasers Property, a residential, retail and commercial property management company, has partnered with the University of NSW Business School in a two-year research project studying current workforce preferences and how they’ll evolve. “We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape things and reimagine how, when and where people work,” says Ranna Alkadamani, general manager, People & Culture, at Frasers Property. “It’s critical for how we attract and retain people.”
The findings of the study will assist the company, which employs 650 people across Australia and 100 in its logistics, industrial and commercial business internationally, to build strategies for its future workforce and workplaces and also help its customers with design across a range of projects, from shopping centres to office and industrial spaces and residential communities.
HR must lead the workplace revolution and be adaptive, insists Alkadamani. “It’s too easy for people to revert to old habits. That would be a missed opportunity.” Leading the way on people issues isn’t new for Frasers Property, which has transformed its culture and is a high achiever in the gender equity stakes, with the number of women managers in the business leaping from 48.4 per cent in 2016 to 80 per cent last year.
“There was no burning platform to change culture,” says Alkadamani. “We weren’t under any financial pressure and people enjoyed working here but it was inconsistent. In our businesses we have CEOs who believe in people having a great experience at work and treating people with respect.”
The property group has focused on developing its leaders as custodians of culture “because what we have learnt is leaders have a massive impact on culture, far more than any other intervention”. Leadership development is not negotiable and involves extensive 360-degree feedback. All senior leaders are partnered with executive coaches.
Among the key lessons, says Alkadamani, is that culture is like fitness – you have to keep working on it or it’ll slip away. “You can have a cultural aspiration that’s shared globally or nationally but the experience of culture is local for an employee – it’s based on where you turn up – so you have to work hard on creating a consistently good culture in every part of the business. We came from a place where culture was good in some parts and not so good in others.”
When you work on culture, “people’s expectations change and increase. You never arrive. We’re proud of our good culture but we know how much effort has been put into it.”
Alkadamani, who joined Frasers in 2005 and now leads a team of 11, says that as the cultural transformation unfolded she was conscious of the cyclical nature of the property industry and its fluctuating markets. “You have to be deliberate to sustain a good culture in the property industry.” But the group, which measures its culture every two years with an extensive, externally run survey, found people in business units that had been through difficult periods in the market still charted well.
What’s more, results of the 2021 survey, in which 90 per cent of employees participated, showed that the company’s culture had been sustained – and, in some instances, improved – during the pandemic, despite a restructure, lockdowns, retail shutdowns, transferring everyone to working from home, limiting numbers on construction sites and curtailing the amount of business they could take on. “We were fortunate,” says Alkadamani. “It’s like we’d built a culture bank we could draw on.”