How HR is influencing business transformation at A2 Dominion Group

Outstanding Workplace Award

The team at People Insight are delighted to recognise A2Dominion Group with our Outstanding Workplace Award.

We celebrate A2Dominion Group for building a consistently positive workplace culture, acting on employee feedback to spark change and achieving an engagement score in the top quartile across all organisations surveyed by People Insight.

This recognition reflects more than a strong engagement score. It shows how employee listening can support business transformation when feedback is gathered consistently, interpreted clearly and turned into action.

A2Dominion used People Insight’s employee survey platform, consultant support, results presentations and action-planning workshops to make survey insight part of everyday change. The result was a listening programme that helped leaders track progress, build belief in action and support a major transformation programme.

Congratulations A2Dominion Group! Find out more here about the Outstanding Workplace Awards.

“We’ve found People Insight’s post survey support really useful; results presentations and train the trainer exercises have helped our managers understand our results and do effective action planning. This is well embedded in the organisation now — the survey and change are part of the daily fabric of how we work, not just a check-box exercise.”

Penny St Martin

How HR is influencing business transformation at A2Dominion Group

A2Dominion Group is a residential property group with a social purpose. Whilst the Group takes a commercial approach to housebuilding, it reinvests all of its profits into building more new homes and supporting the communities where they work. They provide award-winning affordable, private, social rented homes, keyworker and student accommodation and supported housing and homes for older people.

With over 37,000 homes across London and southern England, A2Dominion employs 1,000 people in 60 locations and is one of the larger property groups in the UK, with more than 7,800 properties in the development pipeline.

A2Dominion started a three-year “Fit for the Future” business transformation programme, radically updating services, processes and technology. Recognising market, societal and technological changes, the ultimate aim was to ensure the business was set for a customer-centric, efficient and profitable future.

This case study explores how A2Dominion are:

• Transforming leadership to enable change
• Developing a culture that encourages strategic change to happen
• Evolving HR to become enablers of excellence throughout the employee journey
• Measuring progress with People Insight’s support

People Insight helped A2Dominion connect employee voice directly to the transformation programme. Through twice-yearly “Your View” surveys, stakeholder interviews, a modified Pearl™ survey, leadership and burnout indexes, videographics and action-planning support, A2Dominion could measure whether change was landing and where further support was needed.

Culture change was needed to support business transformation at A2Dominion

As the business transformation programme got underway, the executive management team’s appetite for external, disruptive ideas grew. A new HR Director, Penny St Martin, was brought into the business and saw great potential for the HR function to contribute more strategically to the change.

She quickly got involved in Fit for the Future, running organisation design workshops to help shape how aspirations for change such as “agile”, “culture” and “resilience” should be defined.

HR had mainly been responsible for process, policy and payroll.

“I wanted the business to see how much we had to offer,” said Penny. “HR should be a strategic function with expertise in building long term organisational capabilities — essential for the success of the transformation programme and realising our goals.”

Sitting on the change delivery team, Penny was clear that if technology, service and process were to change, bringing A2Dominion’s 1,000 staff on board would mean more than training. A cultural shift was necessary.

Penny said:

“As HR we invested time in looking at the people impact of the transformation aspirations. For example, we wanted managers to be able to be self-sufficient, productive and agile. But our policies were stiff, lengthy and over engineered — no longer facilitating the behaviour required. We set the tone for the HR transformation to follow by starting working towards turning long policies into succinct, clear advice.

A good example is our dress code policy with 5 pages of guidance, which we intend to turn into 2 words of advice.”

This is where employee listening became essential. A2Dominion needed to understand whether people felt part of the transformation, whether they understood the new purpose and whether leaders were creating the right conditions for change.

People Insight helped bring that evidence into view. The survey programme gave A2Dominion a clear way to measure culture, leadership, engagement and resilience throughout the transformation, rather than relying on assumption.

Developing ‘Leadership for the Future’ behaviours

“Probably the most fundamental activity we undertook to transform the culture was to develop the behaviours required of leaders to steer the organisation through the transformation.”

said São Gorgueira, Head of L&D and Engagement.

“The behaviours would underpin everything — how we do things, how we develop talent, recruit and measure performance. We envisioned them being so embedded in the culture, they would be business as usual.”

The behaviours are:

• Engaging: Achieves collective outcomes by building effective relationships
• Resilient: Does not allow pressure to interfere with thinking, judgement or behaviour
• Performance focused: Delivers a consistently high performance
• Influential: The ability to work with and through others to achieve organisational goals
• Future focused: Looks at what’s possible and how to make it happen

People Insight’s survey approach helped A2Dominion measure whether these behaviours were being experienced by employees. This mattered because leadership behaviours are only meaningful when people can see and feel them in everyday work.

By aligning the survey to the leadership behaviours, A2Dominion could track whether the “Leadership for the Future” programme was influencing employee perceptions and supporting the wider transformation.

A transformative ‘Leading Change’ programme

Of course, introducing, training and motivating all staff with a leadership responsibility on the new behaviours required an extensive programme.

“Leading Change” consisted of five workshops, one on each behaviour, alongside learning hubs, self-assessments, experiential activities and work-based activities delivered over a six-month period.

Says São:

“The programme removed barriers to change, opening minds to a different way of doing things and giving people confidence to take it forward. There were practical tools to handle different people situations, and we’ve had great participation.”

Leadership for the Future behaviours become Behaviours4Success

Having built momentum through Leading Change, the behaviours have been broadened out to all employees, whether they are “leading the organisation”, “leading others” or “leading self.”

Said Penny:

“The frameworks were developed with behaviours bespoke to each division, in collaboration with division leaders defining what good looks like in their teams. This was great for buy in and support.”

People Insight’s survey insight helped A2Dominion keep this work grounded in evidence. By measuring leadership and engagement over time, the organisation could see whether behaviours were becoming embedded and where further support was needed.

The behaviours weave through the performance management framework

Behaviours account for 50% of individuals’ rating in the performance management system designed to encourage staff support for the new processes, technology and services.

“There’s no clearer indication of how important behavioural change is, than making it a significant part of people’s individual performance”

said Penny.

As well as demonstrating when behaviours have been shown positively, A2Dominion have made it just as important to call out unacceptable behaviours that go against this new ethos.

This is a strong example of survey insight being connected to systems, not just communications. The behaviours were not simply launched and left as values on a page. They were built into performance management, development and leadership expectations.

Continuous leadership development

Of course, leadership development is not a one-off exercise.

At least 50 new leaders have joined A2Dominion since “Leading Change”. An integrated model now includes workshops, a social community and resources in the online “Academy”, and an expanded set of capabilities.

The capabilities ask leaders to take personal responsibility for their learning, supplementing led activities with online learning tailored through their PDPs and supported by L&D colleagues.

People Insight’s ongoing survey programme gives A2Dominion a way to keep tracking leadership impact as the organisation changes. This is especially useful in a transformation environment, where new leaders join, expectations evolve and employees need consistent support.

Customer Focus

In line with A2Dominion’s strategic aim to become more customer-centric, the organisation has launched a number of initiatives to encourage customer focus, recognise excellent service and shine a light on examples of great work, whether “customers” are internal or external.

Customer Engagement Awards are nominated across the Behaviours4Success where an employee has demonstrated:

1. Engaging: Making a positive impact on customers
2. Resilient: Achieving results despite facing numerous barriers
3. Performance focused: Actively seeks new ways to provide an outstanding service
4. Influential: Builds relationships with colleagues and customers
5. Future focused: A new and innovative solution to an issue

During Customer Experience Week, people are encouraged to improve customer focus, with news, features, customer experience case studies and manager discussion guides promoted via the intranet.

The link between employee experience and customer focus is important here. If A2Dominion wanted to become more customer-centric, it also needed employees to feel clear, supported and able to deliver the new service model.

People Insight’s survey programme helped the organisation understand that connection. By measuring engagement, leadership, change and resilience, A2Dominion could see whether its people had the conditions they needed to support better customer outcomes.

The vision

Whilst working with the Executive Management Team on organisation design for the business transformation, leading culture change and supporting customer focus initiatives, Penny was also restructuring the HR department with a fresh proposition.

Transforming from traditional HR to a structure of HR business partners, learning and development and centre of excellence, the vision for HR is to “enable excellence through the employee journey”.

The vision incorporates:

• A customer service model: services based on what internal customers need
• Strategic input: business partners providing value-adding support, with expertise provided from the various centres of excellence
• Reduced bureaucracy: freeing people up to get things done faster
• Self-serve career development: guidance and tools with access to learning anytime, anywhere
• Decision making: based on accessible MI or “one version of the truth”
• Services supported by new technology

The proposition was shaped based on input from a representative group of over 90 internal customers, who were asked about their experience of HR and what they needed going forwards.

“The input has been fantastic and really helped us shape a responsive, ambitious offering. We communicated this back to people at the launch of our 3-year HR proposition, showing ‘You said’, ‘Our approach’ and ‘Our offer’. We showed how the HR proposition addresses their pain points, aims to get the basics right and offers an ambitious service to help us realise the business strategy.”

This is a clear example of employee listening shaping HR transformation. A2Dominion did not design the new HR proposition in isolation. It listened to internal customers, identified pain points and communicated how feedback had shaped the new offer.

People Insight’s wider survey approach supported this mindset: listen, understand, act and communicate progress back.

How People Insight have supported A2Dominion

People Insight have worked with A2Dominion for three years. Our employee survey consultants have helped design and deliver twice yearly “Your View” surveys to help them track and improve employee engagement.

This support has combined platform, consultancy, communications and action planning. The aim was not just to run surveys, but to help A2Dominion use employee feedback as a practical tool for business transformation.

Pre-survey stakeholder interviews

Demonstrating a new era of listening to employees and acting on results, People Insight started with pre-survey stakeholder interviews.

This meant leaders’ needs were listened to and incorporated in “Your View” questions, such as:

“There’s a perception the purpose and aims refresh has gone down well — but has it?”

“Do people feel part of the new purpose? Do they understand their role within it?”

The benefit has been that leaders see their personal concerns answered through the survey, so feel involved and take ownership through the programme.

“It was time to break the impact of previous surveys. We chose People Insight because they could provide a flexible approach to engagement surveys and more meaningful, actionable data delivered quickly.”

São Gorgueira, Head of L&D and Engagement

This is one of the biggest strengths of People Insight’s approach. Stakeholder interviews help make the survey relevant to the business context, not just the HR calendar. They give leaders confidence that the questions being asked will produce useful, action-focused insight.

Aligning the employee survey to track A2Dominion’s change programme

Taking input from the stakeholder interviews, we implemented a modified Pearl™ survey with a leadership index that provides evidence for the difference “Leading Change” has made to employees’ perceptions of leaders.

As the results show, A2Dominion improved leadership scores significantly and moved well ahead of benchmark.

This gave A2Dominion clear evidence that leadership development was having an impact.

Instead of relying only on attendance, anecdotal feedback or internal confidence, the organisation could see whether employees were experiencing stronger leadership in practice.

Assessing burnout

Given the amount of change underway, we used the Burnout Index in “Your View” to assess how resilient people were feeling.

This enabled A2Dominion to act quickly where burnout might be an issue and therefore minimise, manage or prevent risk.

This was especially important during a major transformation programme. Change can increase pressure, uncertainty and fatigue. By measuring burnout risk through the survey, A2Dominion could identify where people needed more support and take preventative action.

Providing videographics

Transparency has been critical, showing staff why the survey is being done and what benefit it brings.

We designed internal communications videos to announce results of the survey to staff, showing this was different to the previous approach and engaging them in action early on.

This helped A2Dominion strengthen trust in the listening process. Employees could see that results were being shared, leaders were paying attention and the survey was connected to action.

Effective action planning

People Insight held train the trainer workshops with A2Dominion’s HR teams to support effective action planning and change.

The workshops covered best practice facilitation techniques, how to use the “Your View” dashboard effectively to define meaningful action areas and session templates for managers to take forward internally.

São commented:

“We’ve found People Insight’s post survey support really useful; results presentations and train the trainer exercises have helped our managers understand our results and do effective action planning. This is well embedded in the organisation now — the survey and change are part of the daily fabric of how we work, not just a check-box exercise.”

“Throughout, we have had the opportunity to ‘live’ our behaviours. Leaders are ‘engaging’ with people in the results, we’re using the data to be ‘performance focused’, and the burnout index provides evidence for us to support ‘resilience’.”

The commitment of A2Dominion’s directors to listening to and acting on employee voice has been clear from subsequent employee feedback:

“I have seen Directors want answers and want to engage and make a positive change when receiving the results from the survey. What’s great is that they do this without trying to find out who said what, but much more collaboratively, in an effort to do the right thing. It’s encouraging.”

Anonymous survey respondent

Said São:

“Over the last three surveys, we’ve seen response rate jump by 11 points, indicating people believe more in the process and want to contribute. What’s more, belief in action has gone up 18 points — suggesting people are feeling empowered and getting involved in change. Engagement overall is now at 84%, seven points above benchmark, which is a great place to be at this stage in our transformation.”

This is the clearest evidence of the impact of the partnership. People Insight helped A2Dominion move from results to practical manager-led action. Response rate increased, belief in action improved and engagement rose above benchmark.

For a transformation programme, those indicators matter. They show employees are not just being asked for feedback. They are seeing leaders respond.

Progress and next steps for A2Dominion

‘Your View’ data provides real evidence of cultural change

Penny’s team have achieved a lot over the last 18 months, and the impact is being felt around the organisation.

Said Penny:

“The ‘Your View’ data is providing us with real evidence of cultural change, and we’ve got fun things planned to maintain momentum — a video competition highlighting examples of what has changed the most. HR conversations with the business are really different now. HRBPs are being brought in early to look at strategic issues, being invited on departmental away days. They are being seen as central and important to decision making.

We’ve maintained our Investors in People Gold accreditation and are not far off platinum status.”

The data did more than confirm engagement performance. It helped reposition HR as a strategic partner in transformation.

People Insight’s survey insight gave HRBPs evidence to bring into business conversations, helping them contribute to strategic issues, shape local action and demonstrate the people impact of change.

HR Transformation

“A key milestone that I’m particularly proud of,” said Penny, “is establishing the Diversity and Inclusion steering board, with our CEO, Darrell Mercer as Chair. We’re thrilled with what we’ve started, working through our aspirations for what diversity and inclusion should look like at A2Dominion.”

This shows how A2Dominion’s listening and transformation work continued to evolve. As the organisation strengthened leadership, culture and HR capability, diversity and inclusion became a further area for strategic focus.

Employee listening can support this next stage by giving leaders a clearer view of fairness, belonging and inclusion across different employee groups.

Evaluating the employee experience

Says São:

“The approach so far has set a great foundation for leader and employee participation and assessment of engagement, leadership, change and burnout. We’re now in discussions with People Insight to evolve our approach to look at the broader employee experience throughout their journey, as we enter the next stage of our transformation programme.”

“It was time to break the impact of previous surveys. We chose People Insight because they could provide a flexible approach to engagement surveys and more meaningful, actionable data delivered quickly.”

São Gorgueira, Head of L&D and Engagement

This next step reflects a wider shift from engagement measurement to employee experience insight. A2Dominion had already built a strong foundation for listening, action and cultural change. The opportunity now was to understand more of the employee journey and use that insight to keep improving.

“We’ve found People Insight’s post survey support really useful; results presentations and train the trainer exercises have helped our managers understand our results and do effective action planning. This is well embedded in the organisation now — the survey and change are part of the daily fabric of how we work, not just a check-box exercise.”

São Gorgueira, Head of L&D and Engagement

Start your employee listening journey

A2Dominion’s story shows how employee listening can become part of business transformation.

With People Insight’s support, A2Dominion used surveys to track leadership, culture, engagement, change and burnout. The organisation involved leaders before the survey launched, aligned questions to transformation priorities, communicated results clearly and equipped managers to take action.

People Insight can help your organisation do the same.

We support you with:

• Employee surveys
• Employee engagement surveys
• Change-focused listening programmes
• Survey dashboards and reporting
• Pearl™ engagement framework
• Leadership indexes
• Burnout indexes
• Stakeholder interviews
• Results presentations
• Videographics
• Train the trainer action-planning workshops
• Consultancy and interpretation
• Employee survey communications
• Employee experience strategy

With the right platform, expert guidance and action-planning support, employee feedback can become a practical tool for culture change, leadership development and business transformation.

Ready to get more from your employee listening?

Speak to our team

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