Your company’s workplace culture influences what gets done and how that work happens. Culture is a collection of beliefs and values that shape behaviors. It develops over time and usually reflects the values and behaviors of senior leaders.
All companies have a culture. Talk to employees about “how things work around here” or “the kinds of behaviors that get rewarded,” and you will quickly learn the culture’s prevailing characteristics.
Culture is a collection of individual habits
Sometimes it helps to think about culture by relating it to individual habits. They too develop over time. Some help. Some don’t. We may be more or less aware of what our habits are. Those that are invisible to us are often the most problematic.
Culture is the same way. Your company, division, or department may operate in a manner that best case is holding it back from achieving success and worst case is creating major problems. The characteristic may be obvious, or it may be somewhat hidden and not well-understood.
Cultures can change
It’s not easy, but individuals can and do change their habits. Cultures can change too.
Sometimes they change when there’s a new leader. Employees notice that the leader has a different set of expectations and slowly change their behaviors to meet those expectations. Most of us understand the benefits that come along with staying on a leader’s good side.
Another way is when leaders identify cultural characteristics they want to purposefully change and set about doing exactly that. Often, the change needs to happen quickly to keep up with market or regulatory forces or to respond to a developing crisis.
The change might be about making a positive behavior part of the culture. It might also be about eliminating a problematic behavior. The most transformative cultural changes do both, replacing an undesirable characteristic with one that’s positive.
To learn how we can help, read our culture change service page.
Ideas for your culture change
A culture change begins by identifying the change you want to make. What’s on your culture wish list? If you already have some ideas, select the one that will have the most meaningful impact, and then get busy.
If you need ideas, here are 10 possibilities for you to consider. Are any worthy candidates for your culture change initiative? Once you’ve figured it out, but need some guidance, contact us to discuss how to go about this effort.
1. Data-driven
Perhaps your organization is filled with slicksters, who can talk anyone into anything. They have opinions and arguments, but rarely have any evidence to back up the case they are trying to make.
You believe that the organization’s decision-making batting average is awfully low, but again, have no way of knowing for sure because there isn’t any decision-making quality measurement happening. You’d like the organization to do more measurement and analysis prior to reaching conclusions and taking action.
2. Customer-focused
Everyone in your organization serves someone. It might be external customers who pay the bills or internal customers who play some role in the value chain.
There are too many days when it seems that employees have forgotten the reason the enterprise and their jobs exist: To serve customers. That means figuring out who those customers are, identifying their wants and needs, and bending over backwards to serve them better than your competitors.
You want to build an organization who puts customers front and center on every decision.
3. Proactive
Your existing culture loves heroes, people who run into burning buildings and somehow manage to save the day. The problem is that there are too many fires, and you suspect it’s because all your incentives are focused on emergency response.
Maybe it’s time to create a culture that values prevention. This means taking action before it rises to an emergency. It means creating plans, including contingency plans. It’s about doing the work of keeping drama at a minimum. It’s not glamorous, but it will have a positive impact on stress levels and your bottom line.
4. Responsible
Defined roles and responsibilities are good. Sometimes people need to step out of their defined role and take responsibility. When too many people act like, “It’s not my job,” it’s time to make responsibility a center-piece of your organization’s culture.
Imagine an organization in which employees stop worrying so much about what others are or aren’t doing and instead figure out what they can do in the moment and then do it.
Customers don’t care who’s job it is. As far as they’re concerned, anyone wearing the company’s badge can and should take responsibility.
5. Action-oriented
Some organizations have too many talkers and not enough doers. They are great at having meetings. Unfortunately, meetings don’t produce results. Actions do.
A reasonable amount of thoughtfulness and planning help, but at some point, you need more people willing to act. You recognize there might be more mistakes. You’re cool with that because in your view, action is better than perfection.
6. Transparent
Closed doors and secrecy create the perfect environment for rumors and maybe a few destructive conspiracy theories to flourish.
Imagine flipping the culture on its head. Instead of having to make a case for why we should let people know, we instead put the burden on people who favor keeping secrets.
Start with the presumption that everything should be transparent to everyone. Information remains secret only after making a compelling case for secrecy.
There was a day when secrecy was the norm. Expectations about transparency have changed. Your organization needs to change with those expectations.
7. Assertive
This one’s a game-changer. Assertiveness is saying what needs to be said in a manner that’s direct, honest, and respectful.
Think about how many problems go unaddressed because people don’t raise their concerns (Passive). Then there are all those fights because people just blast away with every thought swirling around in their brains (Aggressive). Back-biting, gossip, eye rolls, undermining, coalition building are all unproductive activities that result from passive-aggressive behavior.
Make this the year when those three are replaced with assertiveness, and then watch your organization come to life.
8. Process-minded
When efficiency is in the dumps because employees all do the work in lots of different ways, it’s time to start emphasizing the value of processes, standards, and procedures.
This cultural norm is one that should be particularly attractive to newer, fast-growth organizations. They are all about making stuff happen and doing it fast. The problem is that this culture usually creates chaos and a whole lot of wasted time and effort.
Helping people see the value in process will be an uphill battle. You’re sure to hear complaints about slowing things down and stifling creativity. The complaints might even be valid. You simply need to be ready to explain the benefits that will result from more process.
9. Improvisational
This contradicts the process-minded option, but it’s meant for a different organization.
Maybe your organization is way too buttoned-down. There is a procedure for every single thing a person might do. The problem is that the world comes up with unanticipated problems for which there is no procedure. And that’s when people get stuck.
Maybe this is common in your world. You don’t need to ditch your processes, but you have to teach employees that sometimes they have to wing it.
An added bonus to bringing this behavior into your organization is that someone’s improv might be the prototype for a profitable innovation.
10. Respectful
You have an organization that gets a lot of stuff done. You hit the goals, complete the projects, and keep customers happy. The problem is that it’s also a tough place to work.
The prevailing attitude is “It’s not supposed to be fun. That’s why they call it work.” People also like to say, “It’s not personal. It’s just business.”
I’m guessing it will be pretty hard to convince people to change their ways when by all reasonable measures the organization succeeds.
Still, wouldn’t be cool if you could meet all the goals AND create an environment in which everyone feels treated with kindness and respect? If you need to make the case, check your turnover stats.
Go to work
Changing the culture takes a plan, persistence, and a whole lot of patience. Like all successful change initiatives it requires a compelling reason for the change, involvement by many employees, continuous two-way communication, flexibility, and a realignment of incentives. In other words, there’s a lot of work to do.
I can help by providing advice, but also another set of hands to do the work. I’d love to hear which cultural characteristic you want to change and then work with you to build and implement a plan to make that happen.
