People and Leadership
How do you really go from good to great? This was the key question posed at the very start of Bupa’s Active Audit Leadership Programme (AALP). “We need to build on what we do now, but enable and empower our teams to do it better, faster and more efficiently”. (Jeremy Eagles Chief – Audit Officer)
In recent years, industries and organisations have been forced to respond to unprecedented levels of change and risk. The coronavirus pandemic has only accentuated and accelerated this trend, particularly for healthcare organisations like Bupa. There has been an ever-increasing demand for the Group Internal Audit function (GIA) within Bupa to find new ways to maintain relevance, speed, and impact in this fast-changing environment whilst also continuing to give greater assurance within the same budget (or less).
To drive this transformation, Bupa GIA had already set a series of ambitious plans into motion during 2020. Good progress had already been made, however, GIA recognised that more needed to be done to fully achieve its purpose of ‘faster and more effective improvement in internal controls’.
Establishing a collaborative and performance-enabling culture would require not only a transformation of approach, it would require a transformation of mindset within the leadership and auditor population. And on top of that:
– It would need to be applied to the entire Global function,
– It would need to be measurable through key functional metrics such as Audit Cycle Time, Stakeholder and Employee Engagement,
– It would need to be sustainable and live on beyond the 21-week initial deployment
And finally, all of this needed to be achieved whilst ensuring existing audit commitments remained on track and on target!
Through the development of a unique behavioural science-based transformational leadership development programme, BearingPoint enabled GIA to experience an immediate skills and performance acceleration, harnessing BearingPoint’s behavioural change and performance coaching capability in the short term, but also meeting longer-term sustainability needs by imbuing these capabilities within GIA for the longer term through a bespoke coaching cascade mechanism.
Over a period of just 3 months, improved operational performance was felt across GIA, with increased efficiency and through this greater audit impact.
The outcome was a huge win-win with new post pandemic operating processes working well, audit efficiency up with a 9% reduction in audit cycle time and employee and stakeholder engagement at a record high.
AALP was not about doing more, it was about doing the right thing, at the right time, with the right skills and the right mindset.
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