Evolve Company Culture
Why does it matter for your business?
Company culture impacts business every day in the most crucial areas, as it articulates in the behaviours we live:
- Company´s ability to drive impact for their customers now, if culture and strategy / goals are not aligned
- Company´s ability to drive impact in the future, if the culture is resistant to adapt to future needs and drive innovation vs. relying on today´s success
- Employee engagement and thus productivity
- Employee turnover and thus potential gaps in execution.
Actively shaping your company culture vs. passively watching culture grow, will make a huge difference to your business.
Live your values!
1. Clarify the cultural values most crucial to drive success for your business and your customers
- design & facilitate a workshop series with selected or volunteering leaders and employees across the company to identify the values by activating people´s input
- Align on the most important values by rating their impact on the business strategy and customers
- Drive a final decision on the values with a defined decision board
2. Bring the values to live everyday
As agreement is reached on the values a next set of workshops would focus on:
- uncovering the behaviours that articulate how values are lived everyday (this may be differentiated different functions and roles)
- articulating what behaviours are not reflective of the values avoids misunderstanding and drives the right behaviours, hence suggested to be part of the conversation and following communication
- Finding a conclusion for the values most exemplary across.
3. Measure adoption and impact
To ensure your culture is sustainably lived, it is recommended to defined and regularly measure a set of metrics:
- focused on adoption e.g. % of employees identifying with the culture, % of employees perceiving leadership role-models culture, % of employees stating culture is a reason for them to stay
- focused on impact e.g. increase in retention, increase in employee engagement, increase in customer satisfaction, new product revenue…
I would suggest the metrics I consider most relevant to you, and work towards sign-off by the respective decision makers, as well as ensure implementation (i.e. technical system implementation, ownership in team).
Considerations:
- This approach would similarly work if cultural values, behaviours measurements are in place and need to be updated. Focus would then be on what is relevant / has become irrelevant given where the company wants to be.
- Any data e.g. from people surveys, customer surveys… would be considered as an input to drive meaningful conversations and outcomes.
Have your people processes reflect your culture
How key people processes like e.g. performance-, talent- succession management, are lived every day is a strong testament of a companies culture. At the same time these processes are connecting company strategy with day-to-day execution for leaders and employees – hence directly impact company performance.
Exemplary along performance management, here is how finding the right approach for your company can look:
1. Current state - WHY is a change required?
- In conversations with senior leadership defining what is changing from a business / strategy perspective requiring a change in how performance is defined and measured.
- Leveraging available data resp. gathering data through surveys or structured interviews finding out what pain points leaders and employees see with the current approach.
- These insight provide a thorough picture of current benefits and opportunities. They will typically allow drafting a first version future concept.
2. WHAT is the future state?
Defining how the future approach needs to look like to be meaningful to all stakeholders and be highly adopted. These are the key stakeholder groups and their typical expectations:
- Business leadership – expect the performance management system to accelerate strategy execution, be agile to adjust to changing demands, foster strong collaboration across areas, ensure every individual understands their contribution and gets the support to build the skills for execution.
- Leaders across the company – expect performance management to be simple, requiring no admin effort; helping them drive the desired outcomes – including clarity on ´what great looks like´, enabling them to grow their employees and themselves, enabling them to drive difficult conversations.
- Employees – expect performance management to be simple, clear, transparent and fair. They want timely feedback that helps them develop i.e. is challenging and constructive, helps them understand what it takes to be a high performer and provides them with the opportunities required to grow. They want transparency in decisions on performance, rewards and promotions.
3. HOW do we get there? This is how key steps can look:
- Agree on key cornerstones of the new approach / non negotiables with the defined decision board
- Enter co-creation sessions to include leaders and employee voices in shaping the approach in detail
- Synthesize session outcomes to a holistic approach to be singed off by senior leadership / decision board
- Design a communication and enablement approach that creates excitement with all target groups
- Define how success is measured along the way