Culture Change. Made Simple.

At a practical level, your culture is the sum of every choice made by every person, at every level, every day. Not the big boardroom decisions, but the micro-choices people make about how to interact and communicate, about the work they do, about the conversations they have – and the ones they don’t. It’s the decisions about how to show up to work, what to contribute to the team, and how to engage with the people who depend on us. And a thousand other micro-choices.

Behind those micro-choices are expectations that people learn and respond to – and that are unique to your work environment. See ‘what is culture change’ for more on this.

It’s all about re-shaping the expectations (see ‘what is organisational culture’). People make micro-choices in response to expectations. This is the tricky part.

Expectations can be described in your values, the code of conduct and the employee handbook. Your executives can sing from the rooftops about what they want. But if those explicit expectations aren’t consistent with the way things actually happen – the implied expectations – they are wasting time and effort.

Over 90% of the expectations that people respond to are implied by what they observe – the way we do things around here. And when there is a conflict between what people are told and what they experience, the experience prevails every time. What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.

There are three key performance areas that should matter to every organisation. Employee experience. User experience. Results.

Workplace culture is positively correlated with all three. The most sustainable and cost-effective way to improve them it to understand and evolve your workplace culture.

By becoming clear on your expectations. You need to decide what great looks like, communicate that, then – and this is critical – hold yourself and everyone around you accountable to those expectations.

It’s even better when you engage the team in defining great. That creates ownership and sets up accountability.

This is what we call Authenticity. Aligning the things you do, say, think and decide with your ideal workplace culture.

No. Engagement surveys are a measure of sentiment at a given point in time. They have benefits, but driving genuine culture change is not one of them. It’s also possible (and relatively common) to have people highly engaged in a poor culture.

Culture surveys help you define your ideal culture, quantify your actual culture, and identify the causal factors that are restricting culture change. They set up data driven, strategic approaches to evolving workplace culture by addressing root causes rather than putting Band-Aids on surface level symptoms.

No. Not unless you are a tiny team, and you are replacing someone who is harmful to the culture with someone more constructive.

In most circumstances, this is a dangerous and expensive myth. Organisations end up in an endless of cycle of chasing amazing people, without addressing the real issues.

The reality. There aren’t many remarkably good or remarkably poor employees. There are just people responding to the workplace culture they are exposed to. Think about yourself. Have you been a wonderful team member in some of your roles, but an average one in others? What was the difference? Almost certainly the culture and/ or leadership you were working with.

The current workplace culture is much more likely to shape the person than they are to shape it. Instead of chasing the next great candidate, create a culture that people respond to by bringing their best self to work.