5 ways to rapidly improve your company culture

Your organization’s culture will either enable you to achieve your strategic goals or get in the way. However, the received wisdom is that an organization’s culture can’t be changed rapidly. If this were true it would be seriously bad news for the organizations that are hurtling towards a cliff edge and need to rapidly turn around performance. It would also be really bad news for organizations that have great growth ambitions and need to evolve rapidly in order to beat off the competition. And organizations that can see disruption coming at them at speed? Well, they’re going to get run over faster than you can say “Blockbuster Video.”

True — there is a direct correlation between the size of the organization and how long it takes to change the culture. The bigger you are, the longer it will take to reach the fingers and toes of the whole organization. But it does NOT need to take years.

Culture can be changed rapidly, if you follow these rules:

#1 Don’t treat culture like it’s a ‘soft’ subject

Ensure that everyone understands that the only reason to look at your organization’s culture is to determine whether it’s going to help you achieve your goals or get in the way. e.g. if your organization is bureaucratic, silo-ed and hierarchical, it’s likely that you don’t move at speed, you’re missing opportunities, you’re wasting money and duplicating effort.

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A common trap I see organizations fall into is to give culture change to HR to sort out — “they know about people… they can do it.” At the point at which you do that, you’ve lost before you’ve really started. You’ve told the organization that you’re not serious about this because you’re giving it to a team of people who, by definition, ‘support’ the business rather than lead it. Culture change must be led by the Executive Team. Actively. Not in that way we so often see, where the program sponsor puts their name to a program and then seemingly develops amnesia about the existence of the project.

#2 Recognise that culture = behavior + infrastructure

Culture isn’t just about behavior, it’s also about the processes, procedures and protocols that either enable or prevent people from behaving in this way. I worked with an organization a little while ago that needed their call centre agents to behave in a more empowered way: i.e. being able to resolve customers’ issues quickly and without having to escalate for a decision. So they sent several hundred call centre agents (over the course of a year) on a one-day training course called “You’re Empowered!!” (Apparently two exclamation marks means “yeah, we really mean it!”) 

They all had a lovely time on the course drinking free coffee and eating choc chip cookies while thinking “this is much better than having to spend the day dealing with angry customers.” And the next day they got back to their desks, plugged-in their headsets and within about 2.5 seconds bumped into rules that wouldn’t let them make the decisions they wanted to make and systems that didn’t allow them to do the thing the customer wanted.

You’ve got to change the infrastructure to enable behavioral performance. Is this now starting to sound like a bigger body of work than you first envisaged? Good. That means you get it. If you’re going to do it, do it properly.

#3 No “values” posters, mugs, or mouse mats

Sticking posters on the walls espousing your corporate values is not going to get it done. No one has ever changed their behavior because a poster told them to. You have to build a robust plan that drives culture change from the Top-Down AND from the Middle-Out AND from the Bottom-Up. I’ve seen multiple culture change efforts fail because they start at the top and then hope that it’s going to trickle down through the whole organization (presumably through some kind of magic). 

It doesn’t work this way: a) because the messaging becomes increasingly dilute as it ponderously meanders its way down; and b) because at or about middle-management level, you’ll hit a blockage. Not because ‘middle managers’ are obstinate and difficult, but because they don’t know what this is for nor what they’re expected to do. And also, they know these kinds of corporate initiatives tend to come and go… and so if they put their heads down, it will all go away.

#4 Ensure that performance is consequential

You have to be willing to apply positive and negative consequences for performance. There’s no point defining the required behavioral standards and then saying, “if you meet those standards, we’ll do nothing; and if you don’t meet them, we’ll do nothing.” A lack of consequence for performance just tells your people that you’re not serious about this. It feels more like a gentle request than a serious requirement.

You need to be very clear about the behavioral standards you expect of everyone. Not by using one of those multi-dimensional matrices of behavioral clusters that HR is very fond of but would leave Albert Einstein struggling to get his head around.

This probably means that you need to change your performance management system to allow you to accurately measure both task performance (i.e. how good are you at the job we hired you to do?) and behavioral performance (i.e. does this person adhere to the behavioral standards that we’ve defined?)

#5 Build bonfires

Don’t tinker around the edges making minimal changes. Think “art of the possible” and if that means throwing some of the ways you’ve always done things on the bonfire, do it. The engagement bounce you’ll get from this is massive. Your people will feel heard and connected. And the impact of that? Increased productivity, quality, service and willingness to innovate.

Here are some ideas to help prompt your thinking about what you might throw on the bonfire: burn down the volume of reports that get issued each week and never get read; delete every meeting from your calendar that you can neither contribute value to, nor derive value from. I absolutely guarantee that doing this will buy you about a day’s worth of hours in every week; look for the brain-numbing and error prone manual processes and replace them with automation. Yes, this might mean some people are displaced, but I betcha there are other parts of the organization that are short on resource — in high-performing organizations, this rarely means headcount reductions.

In summary — get serious about culture change. Make this a true organizational priority, meaning that time and resources are dedicated to making culture change happen. Transformations NEVER happen if you ask people to work on these programs in the margins of their day jobs. Build a robust plan against which the culture team is properly held accountable. Measure whether it’s working and adjust plans as needed. And at the end, sit back with a glass of Pinot knowing that you’ve probably improved the working lives of a lot of people.