Five steps to a better office culture, faster

Culture is not a ‘soft’ subject; treat it like a soft subject and you’ll get a soft result. It’s not about putting posters of your values on your walls, coffee mugs or lanyards. It’s not about beanbags in the meeting rooms – and it’s certainly not about complex competency matrices constructed by HR that even Albert Einstein would struggle to understand.

The next thing to get your head around is that it doesn’t take years to change a culture (despite the accepted wisdom and academic opining). If it did, this would be very bad news for the organisations that are hurtling towards a cliff edge. It would also be really disappointing for those organisations that harbour grand ambitions and a need to realise them before their competitors.

Once the executive team has come to terms with this, the methodology is simple.

Step 1 Define & Decree

This is about defining the behavioural standards you expect of everyone and then decreeing that their use is mandatory. Why use decree – isn’t that language a bit strong? Do we really want to decree that these are the standards we expect everyone to live by? Yes, we do – they might include empowering those with most information to make decisions; working collaboratively across organisational boundaries; and continuously looking for faster, better, cheaper ways of doing things. 

Step 2 Excite & Educate

This is about a) exciting people about the culture changes and b) educating them in how to behave differently. Think about how much harder it will be to do b) if you haven’t done a).

Can you really excite people about a corporate transformation programme? The answer is that while you definitely won’t excite everyone, nonetheless it should be your aim. Because it moves from trying to ‘engage’ people to them actively making the changes you need because they’re excited about the benefits of doing so.

Educate is about building a highly tailored leadership development programme that is specifically customised to the behavioural standards that you’ve decreed. This is not a generic leadership training course; it needs to focus heavily on the actions your employees are going to take collectively and individually.

Step 3 – Exert & Enable

This is about exerting positive power and influence against the forces of resistance – and then ensuring there are no obstacles in the way of people performing the way you need them to.

The trick to dealing with resistance is to embrace it. Many talk about “removing” resistance, but this is a flawed position, as people generally resist because they can see a flaw in your thinking. Listen to them and they can help you to improve your culture change plan – they might become converts who evangelise about the programme.

Enabling means recognising that culture is not just about behaviour: it’s also about the processes, procedures and structures that either enable or prevent people from behaving in that way. There’s no point asking people to behave in a more empowered way when the processes prevent them from making decisions.  Align your infrastructure with the culture you want and people will be able to perform optimally.

Step 4 – Assess & Advise

This is about assessing whether individuals are changing their behaviour and giving them feedback. The theory of this is easy because you know the specific behaviours you need in your organisation at this particular point in time. The reality is more difficult because you need to ensure that your performance management system is able to accurately measure people’s ‘task’ performance (ie how good they are at the job they were hired to do) and their behavioural performance (ie how well they’re performing against the decreed behavioural standards).

Step 5 – Reward & Reprimand

Again, you might be thinking that ‘reprimand’ is a very strong word and is a bit mean and draconian. Perhaps you think this word is more suitable for naughty children in the playground. I disagree – I believe it’s exactly the right word. Put it this way: if you were the private owner of the business and you had to pay people out of your own pocket, would you tolerate under-performers?

Why reward and reprimand? Doing this is the silver bullet – it will change your culture fast if you do it properly. Adapting your performance management system so that good things happen if you perform – and zero good things, in fact even bad things, happen if you don’t – serves to reinforce the required behaviours. This is a reinforcement that the organisation is serious, as well as a potent reminder of the need to use the required behaviours every day.

Andrew Saffron is a world-leading culture change expert, the author of Better Culture, Faster and the director of Innermost Consulting