How to Create a Business Culture (in Seven Difficult Steps)

Introduction

Managers tend to cringe when they hear the word culture, because cultures seem so mysterious and organic, and they are one of the parts of the organization that managers cant control. At least, thats the myth; but in fact you can design your organizations culture and then set out to create it in very straightforward ways. The catch is that changing a culture requires time, participation from everyone in the organization, a long term plan and careful monitoring.

Step 1: What Culture Do You Want?

Probably the hardest part of the cultural change process is deciding what kind of culture you want to have in your organization. Should it be a strict hierarchy, or maybe a democracy, or a loose federation of experts, or something else entirely? How will people make decisions? How will resources be distributed? What are the penalties for failure and the rewards for success? You wont be able to answer these questions all at once, because they will evolve over time, but you need to think hard about the kind of culture you would like to work in - the culture that is likely to attract the people you need to achieve your goals. This cultural visioning works best if you can engage everyone in the organization and if everyone feels committed to the project and shares the same vision of how they want to work, and how they want to treat each other.

Step 2: What Culture Do You Have? \r Now, you need to characterize the existing culture - after all, you dont know which way to go if you dont know where you are. You need to find out what frustrates people, what makes them feel good, what helps them get their job done and what keeps them back. And the only way to get this information is to ask as many people as you possibly can. You can ask people in any number of ways: through surveys, or focus groups, or interviews, or just hanging around the water cooler and talking with people. Write down what you hear and analyze it for common themes - these are your starting point for change.

Step 3: What Needs to Change? \r Now that you know where you are, and where you want to go, you can start planning the changes to get you from point A to point B. You can plan the changes in two ways: by making the small, easy changes first to get momentum rolling, or by tackling the big, important changes to get dramatic successes early, or a combination of the two. But however your decide to do it, you should identify all the negative aspects of your current culture that you want to stamp out, the positive parts of the current culture that you want to preserve and nurture, and the aspects of your visionary culture that you need to create. If you write these down in detail, youll have a road map of the changes you ned to make to create your new culture.

Step 4: How Can You Cause Change? \r Its all very well to imagine a new culture, and to prioritize the needed changes, but how do you actually get a culture to change? Well, its easy to describe the methods, but harder to implement them. For each cultural change that you want to make, try to identify the top five organizational traits that prevent you from making the change and start trying to eliminate them. And at the same time, identify the five most important traits that would encourage the change and start promoting those traits. Youre trying to establish both a push and a pull to get you to the new culture: the push is to stamp out negative practices and the pull is to start rewarding positive practices that get the new behavior started.

Step 5: How Can You Measure Change? \r As you start your program of cultural change, how do you know that youre making any progress? Its not enough just to look around and guess - you have to find a way to measure the changes so that you can tell what measures are working. You can get accurate measurements of the changes in a number of ways: by using employee surveys, by interviewing employees, or by using focus groups. You can also track changes by indirect measures like sick days, or employee productivity, or product quality metrics; all of these are sensitive to cultural issues and will change as your culture changes. And the most important part of your measurement program is to establish a baseline and track the measurements over time. Often the trend of the measurements will give you strong hints about where to direct your efforts.

Step 6: How Long Will This Take? \r So how long should you allocate for making a cultural change? It depends on the scope of the change, how many people it effects; on the depth of the change, how much they must change their behavior; and on their motivation to change. As a rule of thumb, you should predict in weeks for making changes in a teams culture, in months for changing a departments culture, and in years for changing an entire organizations culture. The rate of change may vary from one situation to another. Some organizations start to change slowly, and then pick up speed as the changes settle in and reinforce each other. Other organizations make dramatic changes very quickly, but then require a long time for the changes to settle into the culture and become self-sustaining

Step 7: When Are You Done? \r Organizations that are in constant cultural change are not healthy - they get exhausted by the energy they expend in the change process. So its important to have a goal in mind: a way of declaring, Weve reached the culture that we set out to build. And the only reliable way to decide when youve reached the goal is through your measurements. For instance, you might decide that your goal is to increase employee satisfaction to 85% for six months, or to lower product defects by 30% for a year. With firm goals like these, you can decide how to allocate your time and resources, predict how the change is going, and decide when its time to declare the culture change complete and move on to the next task.

About the Author\r Bruce Taylor is the Owner and Principle of Unison Coaching, and provides corporate and executive coaching to a wide variety of businesses including engineering, human resource, consulting, and recruiting firms. Mr Taylor has extensive background in Psychology, Human Resources, and Software Engineering. He holds a Masters degree in Computer Science from Duke University, a Masters in Psychology from the University of Massachusetts, and a Certificate in Job Stress and Healthy Workplace Design from the University of Massachusetts. He can be reached at http://www.unisoncoaching.com or bruce_taylor@unisoncoaching.com.

Changing Organisational Culture Requires a Change in Leadership
Changing culture or the way we do things around here need not be as difficult as it first seems. We often make it more difficult for ourselves because...

Gaining Profits from Six Sigma Training
Six Sigma training is an approach that is used by several companies to improve their overall performance. Giant companies like Motorola, General Elect...

Using Cultural Models for Changing Corporate Culture
Corporate culture is a label often used to describe the "what" about "why" something cannot be done. Peter Drucker is often quoted as follows; "Compan...

Introducing Coaching Into an Established Culture
For organisations who have dramatically changed their working environment or culture (such as the Health Service or Civil Service) the introduction of...

Training Mojo - Developing a Culture of Training
When the training department is up and running and your courses are being delivered regularly, does that translate into your firm having a training cu...

I Have It Coming
Last week, I wrote about my wonderful experience at Walt Disney World in Orlando, FL. The experience they create and the close attention the majority ...

15 Steps to Networking Success - First Contact to First Meeting
Not many people really like networking. What should you talk about? How much should you talk? What questions should you ask? What's the best way to ce...

Google Indented Listings - 3 Steps To Get One
So you've got your listing in the top 5. Now what? How about doubling your r real estate with an indented SERP result?So what exactly is an indented r...

Change - Accept the Loss of Productivity
One reason why people do not like change is that they will loose productivity when going into a change or transformation. A change is like stopping th...

Change Is Inevitable - Misery Is A Choice
"We trained hard...but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form into teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we te...

Plan Workplace Changes
Whether it's a company wide or department change, you still have to motivate your team to understand, participate and accept the required changes. In ...

It’s All In The Relationship - The Power of Guan Xi
Successful business in China is not reached through merely a good project and good management, that's all significant of course but what can really ma...

Team Member Or Partner
- Putting it in perspective -Through the years, the word "team" has become a cliche representing the whole organization. "We work as a team." Or, "Our...

Three Major Trends In The Workplace
The workplace as we know it is changing. Employers will need to adjust how they conduct business in order to better recruit and maintain qualified can...

Forget Culture, Change Behaviours
Margaret Thatcher once declared: "There's no such thing as society. There are only individual men and women, and there are families." You wouldn't exp...