Akademiska Hus: Clear assignments and the right conditions – the basis for change work and business planning

– For us, Agerus has been a tool to bring out a whole organizational change as we went from being five different, fully autonomous companies to becoming one company. Everyone was very confused at the beginning: who should do what and how to do things? In that situation, we needed a method where Agerus became the framework to get employees working in the right direction.
This is according to Marie Hallander Larsson, HR Director at Akademiska Hus. She has a clear mission and focus on business.

Clear business link

– When I joined the company, my mission was to make the new organization work. In that, I have a clear mandate and only one key figure that I focus on. It is our Akademiska Hus Performance Index. It tells the Board whether the employees in the organization can do a good job that contributes to the goals in the business plan. It provides a very clear link to our business.

Marie continues with a brief summary of the Agerus method:

– It is about clarifying the mission and creating the right conditions for doing a good job. We have chosen to call this the mission dialogue. In this tool, managers have a great deal of freedom in how they do things, but they all have to formulate their own and their employees’ missions.

– We have also been able to use the structure of the Agerus method as part of our business planning, which means that we now have a genuine dialogue in the management groups about our direction and strategy, which they can then take home to their own groups for a continued dialogue about the group’s mission and conditions. In this way, we get everything to hang together from the Board, the management team and all the way out to our talented employees. This is a huge difference from the way we used to work, where the business plan was only revised on paper from year to year.

– We also removed the employee survey, which did not add much value. Being able to say what you think just one day a year, and anonymously at that, was not the way we wanted to develop the business.

Marie Hallander Larsson, HR Director Akademiska Hus

Dialogue instead of processes

Dialogue is central to the Agerus method and to how Akademiska Hus now works.

– “Our entire way of working becomes simpler because everything is connected, but it requires us to be able to have a dialog,” says Marie. “When we do it on an ongoing basis, we don’t need complicated processes and long checklists. For example, we have done away with the traditional appraisal interviews. We have been working with such things for more than 50 years without having managed to change much more than the content of the checklists. We need to do something different and build trust in managers that they can actually have good conversations and are interested in having employees who can do their job.

– We also removed the employee survey, which did not add much value. Being able to say what you think just one day a year, and anonymously at that, was not the way we wanted to develop the business.

Nowadays, the business systems are connected in Akademiska Hus and they are thinking about how the assignment dialog can be transferred to how they work with customers.

Mission dialog with customers

– A good customer dialog is about having common expectations of each other that we want to capture in a conversation about what needs to be done, and then jointly ensure that the conditions are there to succeed with the delivery. And imagine if we got a system that works the same internally as externally – that would be fantastic! Too often, we have too many systems running at the same time that people have to try to understand and relate to.

The transition from multiple companies to one way of working has presented many challenges.

– We have chosen to make the changes gradually. We are often too quick to introduce a lot of different systems and processes. The business would not have been able to do everything at the same time. In the same way, we have started with the managers who have shown an interest. This has created a desire and curiosity in others. Over time, Agerus has given us the same system and the same basic thinking throughout the organization.

The role of managers

Managers have been central to the transformation and needed to be given the right conditions to succeed.

– “We have chosen to be pragmatic and not have a lot of exact templates and checklists for the managers,” says Marie. “The most important thing has been that there are dialogues about what employees should do and that they have the right conditions. But we have, of course, prepared the managers for this and they receive mandatory training every year, mainly focusing on communication and change management. Managers and their teams have also been trained in the Agerus method itself. Our managers have free access to the tool in their own business development and can do as many measurements as they want, and choose to follow up on specific questions on everything from the conditions to how well the basic human needs are met.

The assignment dialog has also been an important piece of the puzzle to solve the competence issues within Akademiska Hus.

Clear missions become the right skills

– I think that much of the discussion about a lack of skills is about nothing other than the fact that we have been poor at formulating the mission and then not been able to secure the right skills. We are a country of over 10 million people. There is no skills shortage in such a large group. Rather, it is about clarifying what needs to be done and ensuring that employees can develop their skills to cope with it. Companies are responsible for creating the conditions for their employees to develop in line with their needs.

Marie concludes with a few words on engagement.

– An important goal for us is to have employees who are committed to their work. We achieve this by giving people the right conditions. This is also the core of the Agerus method. At its core is a strong belief that people can think for themselves and that most people really want to do a good job.