
by Tamsin Howells, Director – Wharton BC
Culture is a bit of a ‘Marmite’ (or ‘Vegemite‘) word – you either love it or hate it, and it is very difficult to describe to someone who doesn’t know what it is. Luckily, I love marmite as culture is work I really enjoy so I thought I’d share a few myths and truths about it:
There is no quick fix to culture. We’ve all tried to change our personal routines and rituals for the better – healthier eating, life balance, new hobbies – now scale this to try and make these shifts across teams and organisations. There’s a reason why culture requires ongoing focus and investment and why culture programmes with good intentions don’t reap the benefits they set out to achieve. In todays ever-changing world staying still isn’t an option if we want our organisation to continue to thrive.
You don’t have to run a big culture diagnostic to understand your existing culture. There are many companies out there which would happily sell this to you, but employee insights have come on leaps and bounds over the last 10-15 years, and often you’ll be sat on plenty of current and relevant data points. Using these combined with employee insight sessions – for example interviews or focus groups – means you’ll get a sharp picture of your current culture quickly.
Culture isn’t just the pink and fluffy stuff. Yes, the behaviours we experience and observe everyday show-up differently in different cultures (whether that be at home or at work) and some might consider behaviours as ‘fluffy’. However, culture is what makes an organisation unique and ultimately determines how an organisation performs. An organisation that empowers, supports, and develops its employees to be the best they can be both at an individual and collective level will reap the benefits – increased engagement, better retention, and higher performance.
So, my three takeaways are:
Break down culture change into ‘habits’ to hold ourselves and each other to account. There are lots of good examples of this but one that springs to the top of my mind is BP employees holding onto handrails as they go up and down stairs, as safety is part of everything they do regardless of whether they are in the office or a high hazard environment.
An example of what you could do: Spend time as a team thinking about the shifts you want to achieve in your culture and the habits that you’d need to adopt to reinforce this change (i.e. to create more open debate and idea generation you could add an open Q&A section as a recurring agenda item in your team meetings).
Regularly check-in on your current culture. If you’ve got a niggle or a hunch that something isn’t quite right, don’t ignore it, look into it. Explore it in a way that is sensitive and engaging to all involved, open-minded about what you might find and the actions needed, and recognise that people could perceive some personal risk by providing their views. Often this requires employees to have an opportunity to provide feedback anonymously and sometimes to a source that is independent or outside of their team reporting line.
An example of what you could do: Try ‘skip level’ meetings where you run sessions with the direct reports of your direct reports to hear new perspectives and gather specific feedback on your niggles.
Be clear on the link between culture and performance. Lencioni’s model is a great way of looking at attributes of a high performing team, and if you can articulate the behaviours you need to live and uphold then you can really start to shift the conversation to business performance as an outcome of your culture.
An example of what you could do: Use the Lencioni model to assess the current health of your team against each element and discuss what better would look like.
We’ve got great experience of culture work across lots of different industries in our team. We’d happily share this if you‘re interested to learn more about what you can do in this space, or if you have some great examples of culture work you’re doing that you’d be willing to share. It’s always fascinating to hear what works and doesn’t work in different organisations!
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