Corporate Culture, Part 2: Creating Lasting Change
In our last blog post, How Do You Define Your Work Culture?, we discussed how elite companies define their ideal corporate culture. In part 2, we’ll discuss the methodology for creating effective and lasting change.
Establishing or reinventing a strong organizational culture requires a comprehensive and strategic approach. Organizations should assess existing culture (either at a company wide level or for a specific internal team), identifying opportunities for improvement, and provide easy-to-implement strategies and tools for change.
"Establishing or reinventing a strong organizational culture requires a comprehensive and strategic approach."
AT Partners has developed an evidence-based, 4 step approach to creating an effective corporate culture. This approach ensures that organizations consider their individual strengths, team dynamics, and strategic goals to provide more than ad-hoc solutions.
1. Discovery: Create a corporate culture working hypothesis from initial primary research
The discovery process will reveal ingrained, and often unspoken employee norms and values, internal processes, and any learnings from prior culture initiatives.
While primary research gives a baseline theory about underlying culture problems, it is still too early to have solidified areas of potential impact. This step serves as the basis for deeper research and understanding.
2. Analysis: Determine focused areas of impact from additional primary and secondary research
The working hypothesis will provide a sense of baseline topics of importance. These are frequently topics that get addressed in primary employee interviews i.e. motivation, communication, innovation, etc.
A detailed employee interview and survey plan is then created around these baseline topics. The questions should have a scoring system attached that allow employees to rate the current environment and point out areas of strength and potential growth.
Interviews are then conducted with employees across all levels, from CEO down to individual contributors.
3. Solutions: Create culture initiatives that align with organizational strategy
Once data is gathered on key areas of impact, the team begins synthesizing data to create initiatives. Of course, it’s important to examine any previous culture initiatives to gauge their effectiveness and long-term impact. New initiatives take into account any success and failures of previous efforts. As in all systematic review, previous failures are examined specifically to determine cause. Was it the initiative itself or its execution?
It is also essential to align culture initiatives with organizational goals. A future blog post will explore the effects of leadership unintentionally undermining culture initiatives, but for now it’s important to keep the following in mind: If culture initiatives don’t align with company strategy, they will inevitably become of secondary importance and are doomed to fail.
Taking these two factors into account, a concise and clear cut action plan for implementation should then be created.
4. Implementation: Create a set of principles that guide your transformation goals
Guiding principles ensure that culture initiatives address multiple themes in addition to the determined areas of impact.
Examples of guiding principles include:
“Categorize and focus initiatives on demonstrated, measurable areas of impact.”
“Create initiatives to support our company value proposition.”
For clarity, these principles are not the actual initiatives, but instead help create a thematic coherence for all future initiatives.