Strong Leadership Drive and Inspires Cultural Change

If your organisation’s leadership wants to embark on an initiative to change its culture you will need a plan. If the goal is to adapt the organisation’s current culture to comply with the expectations of today’s productivity cultures we can assist.

We know effecting change is difficult and the change can lead to unforeseen consequences that can have harmful short term impacts on the organisations production and employee morale. But change is necessary and worth the effort.

We have compiled a simple checklist of what we’ve found, as culture change consultants, to be required to change an organisation’s culture and achieve organisational and client experience excellence.

Begin

It will always be the responsibility of the organisation’s leadership team to start and maintain the change. It can only be the leadership who can make the initial decision that cultural change is a priority. Leadership will decide that developing and implementing an organisational culture that visibly places the client’s description and expectation of value front and centre.

Communicate in a Clear and Respectful Manner the Need, Reasons, and Benefits for the Organisation to Effect Change

A clear statement of what the new direction looks like. The announcement will describe how the organisation is going to treat clients differently. How the leadership is going to support employees. How employees will support the organisation. Because making a change announcement once isn’t enough: you need a clear way to refer back to it over and over again.

Change Hiring Practices – Hire Those Who Reflect the New Culture

Every single new employee, from that moment forward, needs to be hired for reasons that are congruent with your new desired culture. This is very, very important.

The way you bring employees into a company is all-important. It is important the leadership sets new rules for hiring and takes an active role in the early stages, otherwise the new hires will reflect the existing culture.

Adjust Employee HR Policies & Procedures

The Leadership team can make the highest of high-minded values statements. But if employees are still treated and managed by the tools of the old culture there will be no change. Employees will become confused, cynical and bitter. A failure to change your HR department’s culture and personal controls is where your organisation’s drive for a new culture can be supported or sabotaged.

Capture Standards in Policy & Procedure with Clear Measures

Everything that reasonably can be expected to be communicated and provided to clients’ must be standardised and measured. Not immediately, but develop these as quickly as you can.

Important: every process needs to include the reason for the standard, so employees know when it makes sense to deviate from it to accomplish a client’s particular demands.

Come Up with a Sustainable Reinforcement Plan

On boarding of new clients is important, proper hiring is important, but ongoing reinforcement is crucial. Perhaps the best plan for most organisations is to follow the Lean’s daily morning meeting process. For fifteen minutes every day discussing an aspect of the new organisational culture’s demands, celebrating new innovation, discussing mistakes and sales targets. The meeting will be led by a different employee every time. The result, added up over a year or years, is a lot of reinforcement.

Use the Right Metrics – Get Rid of the Wrong Ones

Reviewing your strategy and balanced scorecard to reassesses the organisation’s goals and objectives. What tactics are you using to deliver the strategy? Do you have too many KPI measuring actions that are not important to productivity or what client’s deem as value? Do you have KPIs that are focused on productivity but fail to address the number of new clients using your services? Do you know whether or not clients are satisfied with your service, and as a result sabotaging the goal of a client-centric culture?

Commit Yourself to Employee-Directed Job Design

To facilitate the new culture employees must be empowered to make decisions that have material consequences. If employees are not required to be accountable in achieving the organisation’s goals they will not take responsibility for moving the organisation forward. Once their tasks are completed they will simply wait for a new task. This is not productive and is not conducive to employee retention and world class productivity. If employees are not productive you will need to hire more than needed if the business was productive.

Conclusion

If employees are only doing things right because management has spelled out in minute detail what is required, even if managers do so very, very elegantly, you haven’t created a productive and healthy culture. The company will have failed to create an environment that encourages innovation, going the extra mile and making the company better. Leadership will not have created a process to develop a new and productive culture. A culture is a living thing, powered by and kept up to date by the people who are encouraged, or controlled to be, part of it.

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