BMJ Group affirms voice of authority following success of cultural transformation strategy

BMJ Group has cemented its position as a leading voice of authority within the healthcare sector, following the success of its cultural monitoring strategy, driven by innovative SaaS business, Culture15.

As champions of leading medical research and healthcare knowledge provision, BMJ Group publishes some of the world’s most high-impact health papers and has facilitated doctors in their decision making for over 180 years.

In April 2020, the organisation appointed new CEO, Chris Jones, who was tasked with the development and implementation of a new growth strategy, while ensuring BMJ Group became a valuable resource for both guiding and understanding the impact of the accelerating COVID-19 pandemic.

Historically, BMJ Group hasn’t had a tangible impact framework, meaning it was unclear how its purpose aligned with the commercial interests of the organisation. In understanding the valuable correlation between culture, team performance and business success, Chris appointed Culture15 to evaluate how the Group’s output was actively generating new opportunities while enabling health care systems to drive impactful change, primarily through the quality of decisions made by the HCPs it supports.

As part of this strategy, a full diagnostic was conducted in order to reveal the extent to which current culture and behaviours would facilitate or impede the mission, enabling the Culture15 team to compile quantitative and qualitative data while establishing a business case for change that showcased how purpose and profits can align as one complementary agenda.

From here, Culture15 helped BMJ Group’s leadership team learn to delegate cultural change without disempowering others, successfully setting the tone to ensure their comprehensive for-profit, purpose-driven goals could be realised through purposeful, ambitious collaboration between one another and with customers to drive better outcomes.

In turn, BMJ Group has been able to reinforce its position as the champion of leading medical research, while successfully aligning purpose with profits.

The success of the strategy was recently recognised by the UK Company Culture Awards, where BMJ Group and Culture15 were finalists for Best Cultural Transformation Initiative and Chris Jones was recognised as a finalist for the Leadership Award.

Discussing the success of the cultural change strategy, Chris Jones, CEO of BMJ Group, said:

“When I joined BMJ as CEO, with a new strategy to deliver, I needed to gain a deep understanding of the culture as quickly as possible, in order to understand where my team and I should focus our efforts for maximum impact, and any barriers that may get in our way. Culture15 did just that: in a few short weeks, it gave us accelerated insight into the behaviours within the organisation, so that we could take an informed view of where we needed to develop further in order to deliver against our strategy”.

Headquartered in London, Culture15 has helped many organisations effectively diagnose the culture they have, define the culture they want and then close the culture gap through clear strategy and direction.