The Rooflight Company

Window design and manufacturing company

Offering high quality rooflights, roof windows and skylights, The Rooflight Company is based in Oxfordshire. They have built an award-winning reputation not just for innovation and design excellence, but also for the way they manage, empower and develop the people who work there. The leadership team’s ambitious vision for the company has always included basing every key decision and action on integrity and care, and empowering and unifying all company employees, and the company has recently become fully employee-owned.

Five years ago the company had already done some excellent organisation development work over the previous few years. When we came on the scene, the missing link we identified was a practical and straightforward way of calling individuals to account for their individual roles and the results they produced.

Accessing Accountability

We worked with the Leadership and Core Management Teams in three key areas:

  • to develop individual roles and accountabilities for every director and manager consistent with the company’s vision and longer-term strategy.
  • to facilitate the development of a set of clear behaviour statements for each of the company’s four Values, and…
  • …to incorporate these and the role definitions into a simple, elegant performance planning and review process appropriate to this stage of the organisation’s development.

Val King, MD of the company at the time, had this to say: 

Kate has been instrumental in transforming our tired and ineffective appraisal process and unused job descriptions into a clear structure/framework of accountabilities driven by the company strategy and values. The result is highly effective 1:1s that hold our people accountable to deliver results.

The Next Steps

The Company transitioned to employee ownership during 2019 and the current MD, Steve Webber, was appointed at the beginning of 2020. Despite the advent of the pandemic, with lockdown, remote working and everything else it entailed, Steve was keen to revisit the roles and accountabilities exercise, initially for the Leadership Team and subsequently for every manager in the company. The original values and behaviour standards have stood the test of time and are still key to the management of the company.

Once again, we worked with intact teams:

  • to revisit and redevelop the individual roles and accountabilities for every director and manager consistent with the company’s new vision and strategy.
  • to incorporate these new role definitions into an updated performance planning and review process appropriate to the newly co-owned company.

The intention is eventually to cascade the roles and accountabilities process to all remaining co-owners so every individual in the company has the opportunity to renegotiate and update their role.

The performance planning and review process has been very successfully launched at leadership and management levels, and once ‘bedded-in’ will also be expanded to cover every co-owner in the company.

Rooflight Results

  • Director and Management teams are now completely clear on their collective and individual accountabilities relevant to the company’s direction and strategy right now.
  • Missing and overlapping accountabilities have been clarified and rationalised throughout the organisation.
  • The company has a straightforward and bespoke way of planning and reviewing performance against both objectives and behaviour standards, which is already regularly used by leaders and managers. It will be extended to all co-owners next year.

Let’s hear from Steve, the current MD: 

Far from pausing organisation development work during the initial crisis of the pandemic, I knew it was crucial as quickly as possible to redefine and streamline our role accountabilities to ensure we were fully fit to meet the challenge.

Clear agreements on accountability and behaviour in this small but highly successful and growing company have become the methodology of choice for ensuring role descriptions and the performance management process stay engaging and relevant for all co-owners at each stage of the company’s growth.

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