Have you ever read books about corporate culture and come away overwhelmed? I have. Most of them do a good job explaining what comprises corporate culture, but few lay out steps for how to go about changing culture in a company.
Since culture and change are often big challenges in the work I do in organizations, I’ve been researching action steps that can be applied in group settings in order to facilitate rapid cultural change.
Organizational culture is an idea in the field of organizational studies and management which describes the psychology, attitudes, experiences, beliefs and values (personal and cultural values) of an organization.
It has been defined as “the specific collection of values and norms that are shared by people and groups in an organization and that control the way they interact with each other and with stakeholders outside the organization.” It’s also been defined as “the way things get done” in a company.
Although it’s difficult to get consensus about the definition of coorporate culture, several constructs are commonly agreed upon – that corporate culture is holistic, historically determined, socially constructed, and difficult to change.
I don’t want difficult. I want simplicity and effectiveness. I think I may have stumbled upon some answers. At least, the authors of this book seem to have some good ideas. They explain their definition of culture in terms that will get employees to quickly adopt new thinking and acting to produce rapid results. And they provide examples of companies that used their methods and reached goals within 90 days.
The book is Change the Culture, Change the Game: The Breakthrough Strategy for Energizing your Organizations and Creating Accountability for Results by authors Roger Connors and Tom Smith.
Here’s an example of work the authors did to change the corporate culture in a fast food restaurant chain. The goal the organization wanted to achieve was a 5.5 percent profit margin. First, they determined to stop sending mixed messages by communicating the same key results to everyone in the company. (That, in itself, is often necessary in some companies.)
Then they ensured that all employees could connect the dots between their daily work and the results they needed to achieve (5.5 percent profit margin).
Within months, a check on the alignment in the company proved that people at every level of the organization and within every restaurant understood and embraced the new profit margin goals. A random visit to a restaurant illustrated this alignment. When asked what their jobs were, even the people busing tables were able to articulate their participation in the goals:
“My job is to achieve a 5.5 percent profit margin, and here’s how I do it: The faster I clean and set a table, the more people we seat per hour. The more people we seat, the greater our contribution. The greater our contribution, the better our margin. That’s what I do.”
When people can describe what their job is in terms of what they contribute to driving results for the organization, you can be sure you have a culture that supports the change initiative. The culture is driving action, and people at all levels can see their part.
To me, that’s a good illustration of how culture drives results. What do you think?
If your company is looking to improve the bottom-line, you might want to read this whitepaper to see if changing the culture is the solution you are shooting for: Improve Your Bottom Line by Changing Your Culture.
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What gets measured gets done. The case study highlighted a straight forward example of instituting a performance measure where none had existed – adding rudimentary processes. A tougher test would be actually changing well-developed corporate culture to align with transformative goals – where new processes conflict with old.