Like the medical profession, we are predicated on adopting an evidence-based approach to organisational health using the scientific method to causally link diagnosis and solutions to value and risk improvements.
Deploying OMINDEX® in a corporate context demands a deeper examination of each critical OMINDEX® factor. Our new company diagnostic practice guide provides us with a consistent, in-depth, and comprehensive instrument that encompasses the corporate whole system. It allows us to work with senior leadership to critically and fully examine each OMINDEX® component to identify all possible value opportunities and areas for more effective risk management.
For more information contact stuart.woollard@omservices.org
Snowdon Beinn Ltd. and Organizational Maturity Services LLP (OMS) join forces to bolster corporate board effectiveness
LONDON, 1 March 2021 – Snowdon Beinn Ltd., a leader in corporate board recruitment and effectiveness, today announced an exciting new partnership with Organizational Maturity Services LLP (“OMS”) to offer state-of-the-art board evaluations.
Corporate board effectiveness is crucial to providing direction for a company’s management and culture, as well as creating the right framework for helping individual directors meet their statutory duties. Recognising this importance, the UK Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy commissioned ICSA, The Chartered Governance Institute, to assess the quality of independent board evaluations in the UK listed sector and to identify ways they might be improved. The resulting report, released in January, concluded that better practices need to be developed and implemented to support external board reviews. The partnership between Snowdon Beinn and OMS is in direct response to this recommendation. Together, the two companies provide a unique offering to clients looking to strengthen their board evaluation process – and ultimately, their overall corporate governance.
Snowdon Beinn already provides robust independent evaluations in order to identify problem areas in board processes and makeup – with the ultimate goal of adding new and diverse thinking in the recruitment process. Through this new partnership, OMS’ OMINDEX® (Organisational Maturity Index) will, for the first time, be applied to the board evaluation process – creating a unique offering in the field.
OMINDEX® is a comparative company diagnostic and performance rating system, approved by the Maturity Institute (“MI”), which successfully combines conventional measures of financial valuation with measures of environmental, social and governance (“ESG”) capability and performance. The methodology that produces these ratings assesses how companies create value relative to their effective capacity. The two unique ingredients in this measurement system are: (i) a clinical focus on the returns achievable, and achieved, from human capital, leadership practice and management systems and (ii) an ability to measure the delivery of value to all stakeholders, or Total Stakeholder Value (“TSV”).
ESG has become a global imperative — to boards, the companies they oversee, their shareholders, and other stakeholders, including the environments and communities in which companies operate. In the United Kingdom, the UK Corporate Governance Code sets the expectation that all Code companies will consider regular externally facilitated board reviews, with FTSE 350 companies undertaking such a review at least once every three years. Entities such as UK building societies should also have regard to the Code, including external reviews, as guided by their regulator, the Prudential Regulation Authority. In many other parts of Europe and North America, these external board reviews are similarly expected, or mandated. Together, Snowdon Beinn and OMS are changing the way these board evaluations are conducted – building a more robust process, and with that, companies that are stronger, smarter, and in step with the world around them.
Snowdon Beinn Ltd. was founded by legal and corporate governance experts. Through its externally facilitated board evaluations, it helps boards in their quest for continuous improvement. And through its non-executive director search service, it assists in maximising the collective intelligence of boards by bringing increased diversity of thought to the boardroom. Snowdon Beinn is headquartered in London, England and supports boards globally.
OMS LLP researches, rates and advises on effective organizational maturity and human governance— a brand new discipline that finally makes whole the way we examine, value and engage with companies to generate true, lasting value for all stakeholders. OMS LLP developed and owns the OMINDEX® rating system approved by the Maturity Institute.
The Maturity Institute (“MI”) comprises a global network of professionally accredited leaders, practitioners and academics creating value for all stakeholders through organizational maturity that realises the full value of human potential for the benefit of society. The MI provides a unique, evidence-based approach to organizational health and the creation TSV. The MI has created a new, revolutionary approach to organizational health by raising global standards of professionalism in organizational leadership and management practice. Its OM30 diagnostic instrument enables measurement and improvement of TSV created by organizations and provides ratings on OMINDEX®: a comparative scale from D to AAA.
The MI is operated by HR Maturity Ltd., a company limited by guarantee and registered in England and Wales. The MI is advised by a council of six, including leading academics, and the HR Maturity Ltd. board consists of four members of the MI council.
Paul Kearns, MI Chair said: “We have made an important decision to share our OM30+ methodology (that produces Organisational Maturity Ratings for the OMS LLP OMINDEX). This is a crucial route to develop both greater understanding and the professional practice of organisational maturity and human governance, which will directly improve Total Stakeholder Value (TSV) as a result.
Stuart Woollard, Managing Partner OMS LLP said: “Sharing this methodology will show boards, investors and key stakeholders the power of Organizational Maturity to analyse and measure so called intangibles such as corporate culture, human governance and workforce management and, at the same time, understand their impact on sustainable value and material business risk. We know from our own experience with companies and the investment community that this is compelling technology that enables comparative measures of critical organisational factors that are currently missing. It also facilitates the design of roadmaps for powerful organisational change to make companies fit for purpose in today’s evolving business paradigm.”
ENDS
To obtain a copy of the OM30+ spreadsheet, for self-scoring your organization today, please send your details (Name, Organization, Job Title) to Stuart Woollard at OMS LLP. An outline pdf copy of the OM30+ is available online. The full working template is available from: stuart.woollard@omservices.org
About the Maturity Institute
The Maturity Institute (MI) comprises a global network of professionally accredited leaders, practitioners and academics creating value for all stakeholders through organizational maturity that realises the full value of human potential for the benefit of society.
About OMS LLP
Management quality and capability has been missing from conventional company management, valuation and investment decision making. Company failures and material value loss occur on a regular basis yet approaches to identify root causes use ineffective and weak diagnostics. Traditional analysis may identify certain corporate exemplars but not why they are able to generate long-term value differentiation. OMS fills that gap. OMS LLP researches, rates and advises on effective Organizational Maturity and Human Governance; a brand new discipline that finally makes whole, the way we examine, value and engage with companies to generate true, lasting value for all stakeholders.
“[we are] trying to join the pinpricks of light coming out of the boardroom” Paul Lee, Aberdeen Asset Management, PLSA December, 2015
In one short comment came the admission. Corporate governance teams at investment firms are struggling to make sense of company boards, how they function, and how they drive value creation and manage business risk. In short, conventional governance analysis is not able to give investors the complete picture and the reassurance they need. Moreover, finding ways to help direct companies in a more value-focused direction is often simplistic and sometimes extreme, e.g. pushing for heads to roll when things are going badly.
Why is this so? The room full of governance professionals at a recent PLSA event mentioned a number of factors. Poor information, little transparency, board dysfunction and a lack of senior level ‘quality’ were some of the insights. Ineffective board structures (auditors not gauging risk effectively, for example), weak industry expertise and inappropriate or excessive incentives (executive pay) were others. All contributors made valid points, to varying extents, but all painted a depressing picture of weak boards and blunt tools for investors with which to examine, diagnose and offer coherent advice.
Is this a failure of governance both within organizations and by the people trying to bring higher standards? Can the present approach to governance be fixed? There appear to be two inherent problems:
There is no coherent framework that defines and measures “good” governance – as was admitted by the UK IOD earlier this year. When you look for factors at board level that drive value and risk, to what extent are each actually material? Is the existence of effective NED’s as important as the nature of executive pay? Is board level industry expertise a sign of good or inferior management quality? Does each factor work together to make analysis meaningful on a comparative basis? If we do not know what ‘good’ looks like and how this drives value, how can it be improved?
Corporate governance is one part of a much bigger, whole human management system that must be considered – traditional governance analysis concentrates efforts on the nature and activities of the board. But what about the rest of the organization? Is the board a good proxy for how the organization manages itself? For example, if the board is good at acquiring and sharing critical knowledge, does this mean that the rest of the company is too?
Our approach looks at the governance problem in a different way – something we have called Human Governance analysis. The question we seek to answer is to what extent is a company maximizing value and effectively managing risk arising from its entire human capital management system? This acknowledges and includes important board and C-suite factors but, critically, evaluates how this plays out and connects to the entire human capital management system; including for example, the management of supply chains.
When we analyze Human Governance, we look at all the key facets of value that arise from human capital. Our starting point is to identify underlying organizational purpose, how this relates to business strategy, and then to the performance of all a company’s human capital. We are interested in how value and values are intertwined and permeate and inform both senior leader actions and people outcomes across the entire human system. We are, of course, interested in key aspects of a traditional governance focus that materially impact value, such as executive reward and decision-making. This is an analytical whole system methodology that specifically assesses corporate Human Governance and the extent to which an organization is aiming to achieve maximum value from its human capital.
At the same time, we also analyze company capability to consciously and explicitly manage and mitigate human capital risk. Human capital risk arises out of unclear, distorted or non-committal organizational purpose and seeps through all company systems: from decision-making, resourcing, reward, learning and performance management to quality assurance. We view people risk arising from 12 core dimensions and only by understanding risk in this interrelated context can we understand and predict the likelihood of corporate problems or failure.
So back to the original question – how can you price-in governance? Through our ratings, we carry out comparative analysis across firms and sectors. We are able to identify not just the nature of value and risk areas but also the potential value and risk quantum for particular organizations. We believe you can price the nature of this whole system Human Governance, either through a value or risk factor built into an investment algorithm, or perhaps through more qualitative stock picking processes. Investment professionals can also use the analysis to ask better questions of the board and demand better information: companies are wasting too much time measuring and reporting on meaningless metrics such as training hours rather than learning impact. It is something which investors and investment professionals are now beginning to understand.
