In 2017, the project “Ongoing Values”, launched the year before, continued to promote the dissemination, exchange and sharing of the new Ethics Code.
The aim of the project was to launch an organizational and technological cultural change to develop collaborative systems in order to promote the dissemination, the exchange and the sharing of knowledge, to circulate ideas and to improve the sense of organizational or corporate belonging, stimulating proactive employee involvement in the Company's day-to-day business.
In 2017 the project was micro-analyzed in terms of the relationship between the values and the SEA’s organizational culture with the purpose of ensuring that the Ethical System was not simply a receptacle of principles but also a real accelerator of change in our managerial mind-set, driving excellence, which, as outlined in the industrial plan 2016-2021, is a distinguishing feature to be consolidated in the near future.
For this purpose, we developed 3 distinctive and structured listening sessions for the management team:
- 2 focus groups - this involved 5 company Directors in key Company roles - to identify contact points between the values and the drivers of the industrial plan;
- 25 in-depth interviews conducted with the senior Directors and the management team related to managerial and leadership styles used and practiced;
- an online survey involving 190 executives and SEA Managers (including some involved in the previous phases) which sought to collect a broad range of managerial assessments on Company topics such as collaborative work between functions, dissemination of information, conflict and mistake management.
This diagnostic model facilitated organic and deep discussions on the connections between the Company’s ethical vision, the Diamond of Values, the industrial plan and the risk model, identifying several possible initiatives to sustain and relaunch SEA’s strategic focus.
From the analysis, it emerged that SEA is a Company which engages in robust relationships and inter-dependencies with a broad system of actors, fundamental for the quality of its real and perceived performance. Even in terms of its very recent past, the Company is greatly aware that the development of the SEA business model also depends on the quality of the internal and external relationships it engages in when producing value and that these relationships can concretely sustain continuous improvement of efficiencies and Company performance.
In this respect, the SEA management team outlines the method to build and consolidate these relations, but it also outlines the inherent content of these relations and expresses the need for continuous support of a Vision that takes these into account, or which codifies and develops the role of the Company as the nerve center of the physical, financial and socio-political market in which it is embedded.
Level of alignment between values and organizational processes
Source: SEA
This vision, outlined above, accompanies and enhances the most concrete values of the Industrial plan (development of international traffic, development of non-aviation revenues, further cost reductions) providing an interpretive framework as well as a coherent and unified method to consolidate:
- the interdisciplinary and inter-functional work required to govern the underlying complexity of the SEA business model and to create further and continuous efficiencies;
- the cultural change necessary to robustly drive and create elasticity in the related decision-makers’ mind-set and to innovate the Company's processes and technological infrastructures;
- the SEA employees’ commitment to the objectives of achieving excellent performance.