RealControls

Understanding the interaction between culture, behaviour and business ethics is clearly high on the corporate agenda for business leaders, senior accountants and regulators alike. The largely regulation and rules-based response to the financial crisis has somewhat missed the main problem. Many people with whom we engaged expressed despair with what they see as a general tendency to apply quick fixes and ‘snake oil’ to deep, complicated and often poorly understood behavioural issues.

RealControls is the first method enabling organisations to chart cultural risks and ineffective behaviour within organisations in a logic and systematic way. RealControls can be described as an X-ray machine for the soft side of organisations. In addition to providing insight into risks, RealControls charts cultural differences and balances within the organisation. And substantiates topics such as alignment and engagement with hard objective figures, thereby detecting a number of issues requiring management attention.

Easy to understand RealControls reports have been designed to provide a clear overview of all the sections and teams within the organisation, which teams do require management attention and what team’s mindset/mood is in relation to work, strategy and management. On the basis of a brief and clever questionnaire RealControls calculates a cultural risk level score per section within the organisation, applying the formula opportunity x impact = risk. In many occasions an organisational wide culture programme is not appropriate; those sections within the organisation with a high risk level score require a specific approach, sections with a low risk level score are already working effectively and as such do not require any intervention.

The RealControls report sums up which priorities the management should set in controlling risks (what to fix now and what to do in the future). Per team the report indicates a risk level score and a suitable approach matching the mindset/mood of each team. The benefit of RealControls extend beyond decision makers to the entire organization. RealControls provides a means to actively discuss risk behaviour and engage people at all levels in a positive way. RealControls provides logic to communicate with teams in a tailored manner, fit to their mindsets and circumstances in the best possible way.

In RealControls the following factors are addressed separately and used for the assessment of the risk score for an organisation section:

1. The extent to which the culture of that organisation section is in balance. Do people exaggerate in a particular direction, do people have blind spots?
2. The degree of engagement, or rather the presence of a foundation for dis-engagement from the perspectives of strategy, work & management.
3. The degree of alignment between the preferences of people, their work & the management style.
4. The rating by the employees of various aspects within the organisation section. These results also provide an accurate picture of the level of satisfaction of the employees.