Many leaders would like to improve their workplace culture, but they just don’t know how. In this article I will share with you 5 steps that you can take to change your workplace culture.
What is culture?
Before we dive into the 5 steps, let’s have a very quick look at what culture is. Many people think that workplaces have a good culture if they have regular social events, give employees free lunches and foosball tournaments. The problem is that these events don’t CREATE a good culture.
Culture actually refers to the way in which people at the organization behave, the way they conduct themselves, the way they make decisions and the way they interact with each other.
All the pizza parties in the world will not CREATE a good culture if the leader of the organization disrespects people.
How are cultures formed?
Cultures are formed by encouraging, discouraging, and tolerating behaviors. If sharing ideas is encouraged, more people will share more ideas with each other. If laughing and making jokes in the open-plan office area is discouraged, less people will laugh and make jokes. If tardiness or rudeness is tolerated, more people will be late for meetings and will be rude to each other.
Many people believe cultures are created organically and therefore, cannot be changed. But this points to a lack of understanding of what culture REALLY is. If cultures are created by encouraging, discouraging and tolerating behaviors, then we can change culture by encouraging, discouraging and tolerating DIFFERENT behaviors.
So how do we do that?
Let’s dive into the 5 steps.
Step 1: Evaluate your current culture
You will have to be real about your current culture. You will have to be really honest with yourself – what are the behaviors that most of the people in our organization display? Are they friendly? Do they stand up for each other? Do they innovate? Do they complain? Do they put the customer’s needs first?
You can also evaluate the current culture by talking to others. Every person will have a different view or perspective about what the organization’s culture is, and that perspective is true for them. Ask people how they feel when they come to work on Mondays? Ask whether they like their colleagues. Ask if they feel respected. Ask if they know that their manager will have their back if they make a mistake. Ask what they like most about the workplace. And ask what they would change.
Step 2: Find the root causes
Step 2 gets a bit analytical. If we don’t understand WHY our culture is the way it is, we won’t be able to change it. If there are managers or senior leaders that are pushing their own agendas, or mistreating employees, you will never be able to improve your culture until you deal with that.
If people are afraid to give their opinions, why are they afraid? Who is going after them? If people are not treating the customers right, is it because too much focus is placed on closing tickets? And no measures exist for measuring customer happiness? Evaluating how the culture is being perpetuated will help you understand where to begin.
Step 3: Craft your desired culture
Once you understand what your current culture is and why it exists, move on to step 3 – deciding what your culture SHOULD be or what you WANT it to be. Your desired culture will have to align with 3 things to be effective.
It should align with your own personal values. In order to maintain a new culture, you will have to behave authentically in alignment with your desired culture. You cannot do this if you are trying to create a culture in which you don’t personally believe.
The second thing that must go into your desired culture is an alignment with your strategy. Your culture should ENABLE your strategy. If your strategy calls for innovation, you need a culture that promotes sharing ideas, trying new things and accepting the possibility of failure. If your strategy calls for customer centricity, your culture should include empathy, good communication, and give front line workers the authority to do what is best for the customer.
This is a very difficult step in the process, but one that can make a significant impact on your ability to deliver on your strategy. I have a course that goes into much more detail on how to align your culture to your strategy and to go through these 5 steps. If you would like more information about that, click here.
The last thing you must consider for your desired culture is employee wellbeing practices. Companies need people in order to achieve their goals and fulfil their purpose. You want your employees to be loyal, resilient and working at their best. To achieve that, employees need to feel cared for and respected.
Changing workplace conditions to foster employee wellbeing will not only improve employee health, but will also improve job performance, increase productivity and lower levels of employee burnout. This will also lead to less resignations, quiet quitting and loud quitting.
Step 4: Plan for change
Now we a description of your current culture and a description of your desired culture. In step 4 we can compare the two cultures and identify the differences. Where are the gaps? What will have to change in order to move from your current culture to your desired culture? What actions can you take the get there.
This is time to start gathering support and buy in from your leadership team and put an action plan together to take you from your current culture to your desired culture. What behaviours do you want to encourage and how can you best encourage them? What will you no longer tolerate? What will you no longer allow? Put it in an action plan, assign accountability and due dates.
Step 5: Execute and Monitor
All that is left in step 5 is to execute and monitor the change. You will have to decide on metrics or measurements that will show you how far or how close you are to the culture you want to create. If you want a customer centric culture, these will be your customer experience scores, like net promotor score, customer satisfaction score and customer effort score. If you want an innovation culture, this could be the number of ideas raised or the number of ideas that make it through your innovation funnel to execution. Monitor the metrics to see whether your action plan is working and adjust as required.
Need help?
Culture is a very complicated concept. It involves the personalities of all employees, their desires, their histories, their unresolved traumas, their hopes. It also involves group dynamics like politics and social identities. There is no silver bullet that will solve all of your cultural problems. But we can start somewhere.
If you are looking for a very practical way to get started with improving your organization’s culture, check out my Culture Blueprint course. It will give you an in-depth, step-by-step, 100% practical blueprint for evaluating your culture, understanding how it was formed and how it is being perpetuated. It will help you craft a desired culture that enables your strategy and is sustainable, for you and your employees. It will also help you craft action plans, communication plans, metrics and measures and progress dashboards. If you want to get started with culture TODAY, this is the course for you.
