It’s time to change your organisational culture.
Cultural change often starts with something not working properly. You may decide to change your culture because your business suffers from:
- Low morale
- Siloed departments
- Poor communication
- Absent leadership
- High employee turnover
- Low productivity.
How do I change the culture of my organisation?
The process of changing corporate culture takes time and commitment. It can take two to three years for a full cultural transformation.
There are five key steps we believe in:
- Understand your culture. What influences it?
- Base line your culture. Give yourself a starting point so you can measure changes
- Decide on what you want to change
- Develop an action plan
- Monitor your plan.
1. Understand your culture
It helps to understand what influences your culture if you want to change it. An example of a model that we find useful is the Scholes Cultural Web.
The Scholes Cultural Web model describes a corporate culture using six elements:
- Power Structures: who makes and influences decisions. This can be different from the organisational structure
- Organisational Structures: the formal chain of command
- Rituals and Routines: for example, standing meetings, drinks after work
- Symbols: for example, desk placement, titles, bonus payments
- Control Systems: for example, performance management system, audit
- Myths and Stories: for example, recounting corporate/personal triumphs or disasters.
This model is particularly useful because a plan can be developed to change the constituent parts for each element, or combination of elements.
2. Base line your culture
You can base line your culture with a survey tool.
Change Factory are accredited providers of the following survey tools from Human Synergistics:
- Organisational Cultural Inventory (OCI): assesses an organisation’s culture, norms and behaviour
- Life Style Inventory (LSI): looks at the individual behaviour of leaders (a major contributor to an organisation’s culture)
- Group Style Inventory (GSI): provides information on how groups work together as a team.
3. Decide on what you want to change
From your survey results, pick out one or two things that will have the biggest impact on the cultural change you want to make.
4. Develop an action plan
Put together a master plan of your changes. This plan will usually include the following integrated documents:
- Communications plan
- Training and/or senior management leadership and coaching plan
- Stakeholder management plan
- Risk management plan.
5. Monitor your plan
Six months after your base line survey, we recommend that you take a pulse survey to see if the actions you have put in place are starting to work.
Within 18 months to two years from your first survey, re-test your culture and find out the results of your plan.
The ROI of cultural change
The benefits of changing your culture are the obvious flip-side of having a bad one…
- Improved morale
- Departments/teams working better together
- Improved communication
- Personal leadership
- High employee retention
- Better productivity.
The end result is a real and measurable impact on your bottom line.
If you would like help to transform your organisation’s culture, contact us today.
