The last 30 years has been littered with failed culture change efforts. Most you won’t have heard about, but some (e.g. Enron, Uber, Walmart) have become etched into corporate folklore. 

As a practitioner in the organisational performance area, with footing in both practice and research, it appears to me that our progress in implementing successful culture change is unnecessarily slow. In our recent Australian State of Organisational Culture survey, we found that 97% of organisations were talking about culture as a priority, and 83% of organisations felt that interest in culture was increasing among their board and C-suite leaders. The evidence linking culture with organisational performance has been clearly established, and boards and C-suite leaders are growing in their commitment to generating culture changes necessary to enable their strategy. However, our research and experience of what and how organisations are responding to this suggests a deep divide between executive commitment and aspiration to change, and the actual practices organisations are investing in and implementing to generate and sustain real change.

What to STOP now!

If you are a CEO or CPO contemplating culture change effort and investment, here are some key considerations based on significant research and extensive practice. 

1. Stop entertaining the notion that culture can’t be defined and measured.
   Organisational culture is more than the ‘vibe’ and it can be defined and measured accurately and used to support planning and monitoring of change. In fact, there are well defined areas of culture that predict the likelihood of specific business performance outcomes.
    
   
2. Stop thinking engagement and culture are the same, they’re not.
   Boards and Executive teams have been misled into believing employee engagement is the same thing and is ‘the measure’ of all things people and culture.
   
   Engagement measures how people ‘feel’ about the place they work – and provides management with a temperature check of their employee's mood. A good culture framework and diagnostic measures how an organisation works to deliver its strategy, services and to adapt to change.
   
   If you are seeking to establish a culture that is aligned to and enables your strategy, don’t start with engagement. An uncomfortable truth is that many leaders and employees do not see employee engagement diagnostics and related processes as central to the way they plan, run, and monitor the health of their business. They often see it as a HR led activity. In some (not all) cases, employee engagement work is gamed as it does not obviously connect to the operation and improvement of core business and work practices.
   
   
3. Stop developing a budget that covers the measurement of culture but allocates zero towards efforts to implement and act.
   It is common to see an organisation spend anywhere between $50-$200k measuring their culture but have no provision or plan for how to take action thereafter. The result, unsurprisingly, is…..no change. Or worse. An assessment or diagnostic is the first step in defining and implementing a performance strategy for an organisation. In isolation it is nothing more than some interesting data on a report. 
   
   
4. Stop developing corporate culture change plans amongst executive and senior leaders, they don’t work.
   If a cultural change effort is not made meaningful at a local level, where the teams that do the work and interact with customers/stakeholders to deliver services and value operate, then it will be irrelevant to those people.
   
   Most employees are committed to delivering their core work well; and understand intimately the work practices and activities they undertake each day. Action planning that does not involve these people, especially local line managers, will not result in scaled or sustainable cultural shifts. The role of executives to steward, support and advocate for cultural shifts is important, but it’s not where the lion share of effort, engagement and investment should be focussed….but usually is.
   
   
5. Stop overinvesting in values work.
   With good intentions, efforts to ‘do something about the culture’ often get reduced down to ‘let’s (re)define and (re)embed our values’. Over the years, millions, probably billions of dollars have been invested in efforts to change the values and mindsets of employees because we have come to know that these mental constructs (values) are the root of our expressed ebehaviours and culture. Whilst this may be true, values are difficult to work with as the key/only driver of culture change as they are very difficult to define in a way that shared understanding is established. This extends to difficulty in measuring and monitoring progress, and as an extension, embedding accountability to values is challenging.
   
   More importantly, whilst changing the values and/or mindset of employees seems to be a way to target the ‘root cause’ of cultural issues, people don’t really respond to ‘values change’ work particularly well. Research has shown that adults change their ways of thinking when faced with personal experiences that challenge what they have been doing or present another, previously hidden path or way of operating. The path to change then is largely through ‘doing’ and ‘experience’. Focussing on work practices, specific behaviours and habits (ways of working), perhaps coupled with some key tools to support these new actions has proved much more effective in generating sustainable cultural change.
   
   I love the quote from Robert Buckminster Fuller, one of the preeminent thinkers of the 20th century who summed it up nicely “You can’t change the way people think, all you can do is give them a tool, the use of which will change their thinking.” In summary, get practical with cultural change actions that relate to everyday tasks and work that matter. 
   
   
6. Stop doing everything, and overtly connect culture to strategy.
   Most organisations develop culture without overtly connecting it to the performance priorities of the organisation or industry in which they operate in.
   
   When strategy and successful strategy execution is the starting point, that helps reveal and define the cultural priorities necessary to deliver the strategy. This also helps to rationalise the prioritisation of just 3 or 4 areas of cultural focus and builds commitment through this logical framing. This contrasts with work that assumes that the connections between ‘culture’ and the day-to-day priorities of leaders and teams will be either considered or understood. 
   
   
7. Stop using poor frameworks and diagnostics.
   There are very good culture frameworks and diagnostics out there, but they are outnumbered 10:1 by poor ones and the poor ones are often very prominent in the marketplace. The most common challenges are that employee engagement measures and providers often masquerade as culture framework and diagnostic providers.
   
   One common challenge is the need for culture work to be easily accessible and relatable to how people and teams do work and business every day. If the framework you are using is using language and terms that are confusing or overly psychological in nature and are not easily understood by a year 11 or 12 student, then you are creating something that will not be understood by most employees who are probably more interested in their core job. If your preferred tool requires accreditation to use and understand it, you should be very worried.
   
   Finally, you should understand what evidence and research underpins the framework and diagnostic. We are constantly surprised to see organisations use tools that are underpinned by personality research (problem being that a company is not a person), or that are designed by the organisation with no view to the 30 years of research in this area. If you want to engage your organisation in culture work that is actionable and focussed on improving organisational performance (i.e. customer experience, sales and growth, innovation and agility in the market place, effective risk management, efficiency and profitability, employee retention and experience etc.), then look to see how that tool and framework has been shown to predict those outcomes. Most are not based on performance outcomes, and as such struggle to lift the focus of culture to a strategic level….which is what our board and executives are seeking help with. 
   
   

Culture is a performance lever, use it!

Culture and performance go hand in hand and are great predictors of each other. Effectively assessing and defining how your organisational culture can contribute to your strategy and performance is a growing concern and priority for most CEO’s. 

Learn more about linking organisational culture to performance and download our white paper.