Culture change is a process, not an event!

By Susan Waldman, HR Business Partner

Culture impacts everything we do in our organization and most importantly it is a critical component of the overall engagement of any workforce.  Therefore, it’s necessary to continuously evaluate and improve your culture if you consider yourself a strategic leader.  This is not only good for your employees, it’s good for business. That’s why one of our clients embraced the need to measure the alignment between their values and their culture.  They believed that their values need to always be reflected in “the way we work around here.”

The problem was that they didn’t know where they were in their culture evolution and needed to:

1. develop their culture roadmap,
2. measure where they were in their culture evolution and most importantly
3. commit to actions to improve their culture and lastly
4. monitor improvement.

So, the big question is, how could they make that happen in working with HRBOOST®?  Easy! We worked with them to clearly articulate their Culture Roadmap™, which included listing the company’s critical performance priorities and their perceived core value adoption among the workforce. .  Then they needed to identify their current culture through a survey that measures how well their culture is aligned to their perception. We feel it is necessary to establish a baseline metric.  The next step in the process was to align the results to areas for improvement and actions.  The best part of the process is that a “culture team” comprised of employees throughout the organization was formed to represent the voice of the employees and deliver the recommendations to the leadership team themselves.  We facilitate and coach that team to empower the people to be solution driven. Remember, culture isn’t a leadership issue.  Everyone plays a role in the establishment and improvement of the culture, so everyone’s voice should be heard.  This is a great way to gain buy in from the entire organization. With this team, we even facilitated the team from three different locations as the client is a multi-state employer.

Then what?  The easy part was behind them.  Measuring the culture and identifying areas for improvement that will have the most impact on business performance is black and white. In fact, many companies propose that is all you need. We know that is not true.  The culture team drilled down on the survey results for qualitative data and we coached them on how to engage their peers, then they interviewed employees to really understand the meaning behind the results.  This served as the basis for establishing action plans.  They we partner with them to identify root causes and further correlate root causes to potential impact against strategic imperatives posed by executive leadership. It was a real thrill to see the culture team in action when they provided an executive summary to the leadership team, along with an action tracker.  Now it’s the responsibility of the leadership team to move things forward as the teams’ executive sponsor.  Throughout the entire process one of the most critical components is to communicate progress to the employees.  This includes periodic updates ideally in face to face meetings to revisit and pulse on action plans..  This way, employees know that work is happening along the way and can understand when priorities shift

In closing, the real work is in the follow through.  If you want to improve your culture you need to be diligent.  Wash, rinse and repeat… Measure, implement actions and measure again.  Remember, culture change is a process, not an event. To learn about how we can partner with you to build Accountable Culture Management™, give us a call at HRBOOST®!