This is going to be easy! So, we thought in 2015.
When we conducted our first culture research survey in 2015, we were excited.
Our survey results identified a set of key metrics we could use as a baseline to measure the core dimensions that directly impacted a company’s culture: Trust, Communication, Accountability, and Alignment.
In 2016, we conducted another culture research survey to verify our results.
Again, the survey results confirmed our findings. At this point, we thought we had the magic touch. That feeling vanished in 2017 when we began trying to help companies leverage their culture survey results to improve their culture.
What we quickly came to realize is measuring company culture was easy but changing company culture was hard.
In retrospect, we should have realized the truth of this from the start. When we took a step back and looked at the host of culture and workforce engagement tools, we discovered they were survey tools not transformational solutions. They were designed to measure not change.
We quickly realized that if we wanted to make a lasting difference, the tools we developed at The Culture Think Tank needed to not only drive change but empower leaders with the metrics they needed to drive performance because change for change’s sake is pointless.
It was at this point we adjusted our focus from trying to figure out how to measure culture to understanding the factors that enable cultural change and drive performance.
From 2017 to 2018, we sought to identify the critical factors that empowered cultural change and provided an analytic foundation for our culture and workplace performance suite of tools. After two years of research, we identified five drivers of cultural change and performance:
1. Leadership Behaviors
Organizational change does not happen without leadership support. This is a simple truth we intuitively knew but became apparent when investigating the factors that enable cultural change.
Leaders are the catalysts that set direction and empower change. We came to realize that the metrics we use to measure culture and workplace performance have to map to leadership behaviors because leaders drive change. More importantly, leadership behaviors can be encouraged and developed through leadership training programs, creating the opportunity for predictive analytics.
By identifying and mapping discrete leadership behaviors to each dimension of culture, we are able to prioritize and communicate the leadership behaviors an organization needs to focus on and/or develop through training. Leadership behaviors make cultural change possible.
2. Culture Pods
Once we recognized the pathway to cultural change depends upon leaders, we realized a weakness: most culture and engagement surveys treat a company as a single connected team rather than a network of independent teams led by a variety of leaders.
Although many surveys capture metadata and organize results by department or location, the results are more often than not aggregated results that mix independently led teams together and generate average results. As a result, the corresponding leadership behaviors reflect the most common leadership behaviors among teams rather than an optimal list of leadership behaviors specific for each independent team that enable culture change.
A list of common leadership behaviors represents a general average that provides interesting metrics but is not optimized to drive cultural change or performance. To drive performance, we realized culture metrics and measurements need to be organized by discrete leadership groups we refer to as culture pods. A culture pod is a connected network of employees within the workforce whose day-to-day activities are managed or overseen by a discrete set of leaders whose leadership behaviors directly impact the performance of the team.
By focusing on the metrics and corresponding leadership behaviors for each discrete leadership group or culture pod within an organization, cultural change and performance improvement for the entirety of the organization is possible and optimized.
Actionable Incremental Improvement: Knowing the leadership behaviors with the potential to impact culture and drive performance is useless unless action is taken. After focusing on leadership behaviors, we quickly realized less is more. A comprehensive list of the top twenty-five leadership behaviors determined to improve culture is too much for leaders to focus on and address.
When it comes to moving the needle on company culture and performance, we found less is more. The optimal approach we discovered is assigning one or two leadership behaviors for each leader to focus on in a given month. By focusing on a limited set of behaviors, leaders are able to adjust and develop specific leadership skills each month that over time yield organization-wide improvement.
3. Feedback
One of the most overlooked and easiest drivers to implement cultural change and drive performance is providing feedback. When you ask a workforce to provide their input via a survey or poll, they expect feedback. This is often overlooked by leaders.
As a result, the workforce becomes disengaged and is not empowered with the information they need to help drive change and performance, making the survey results useless.
It does not take a great deal of feedback, but feedback does make a difference. When a workforce is informed with a summary that includes the actions you, as leaders, will be taking, the workforce will know what actions to look for and will be supportive of those actions. Only through action is change possible.
4. Comparative Metrics
The final driver we identified is the need for comparative metrics that provide leaders the ability to compare culture and performance metrics overtime and against other organizations.
Ultimately, it is the trend data that creates the environment that sustains change and performance. When leaders are provided the metrics that show growth, they are motivated to maintain the growth by sustaining the change.
In most organizations, it is all too easy to revert back to old behaviors and habits. By monitoring and presenting the growth, leaders and their teams are provided a monthly benchmark to sustain or achieve.
Although it took two years to define and verify the drivers of change, the long road was worth traveling. Over the past 12 months, the adoption of the five drivers of cultural change and performance within our methodology has resulted in an average improvement in our client’s culture and well-being scores of 20% within 90 days.
Updated Results:
