Culture can seem a vague and unclear concept to get our heads around, it’s not as easy to see and measure as customer satisfaction, budget or headcount. Planning and embarking on a culture change journey often suffers from this same vagueness; a reluctance to go for clarity and put numbers on expected outcomes. However, like any other change, when you embark on a culture change journey you need to be clear on the outcomes you expect, and have a way of measuring progress.
1. What’s the problem you are trying to solve?
The best place to start a culture change is to get really clear on why you are doing this. What is the change in mindset, behaviours and actions you want to see?
2. How might we solve this?
Then, with a clarified problem statement, you can ask: how might we solve this?
Generate as many ideas and options as possible, suspend judgement: the more options you have here the easier the next step is.
3. Make trade-offs.
In an ideal world you could do lots of things to all areas of your business to change the culture, but the reality is you have limited time and resources. This means working through choices and making trade-offs, doing some things and not others.
Instead of spreading your culture change initiative thin, do a small number of focussed initiatives that are going to have the most impact.
So, consider which specific areas of the business / employee lifecycle / regions / teams etc will you address with which initiatives. This gives you the “Where” and the “How” of your culture change focus.
For example, focussing on hiring leaders for values and culture fit. This is a focus on a specific time in the employee lifecycle (hiring = “where”) and a targeted initiative (aligning the recruitment process to values and culture = “how”)
4. Radically prioritise.
Then, when you have a few chosen where/how approaches, work through them to figure out what you will need to do to make them really work, what you expect as outcomes and how you will measure it. This will naturally lead to discarding some and ordering the rest into a prioritised list.
If you want to be really fancy you can line up these initiatives as an agile burn down list to work through in time.
5. Communicate the focus.
Doing only a small number of focussed initiatives at a time can feel to most of the organisation as if not much is happening, so you will need to clearly communicate the rationale behind this targeted, focussed approach.
6. Run an open process.
Having an open process of culture change, where employees can view what the current target initiatives are, how they are tracking and what’s next on the list, will give people the confidence that things are changing. You can also have this as the place for people to suggest targeted culture initiatives for consideration.
My experience of culture change is that it’s very common for organisations to take on lots of initiatives at the same time, a real scatter gun approach, with no clear view of how to measure progress or outcomes.
By taking a radically focused approach, being as clear about what you are not doing as you are about the things you are doing, then your culture change moves from a potentially out of control, boundaryless project to a targeted, measurable, do-able change.
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