Refresh or Reset Corporate Culture?
Your culture can either help or hinder your business and people strategies. The combination of COVID, the great resignation, and high inflation has caused many leaders to focus on their organizational culture. Have you assessed the current state of your corporate culture to know where you stand?
The Importance of Corporate Culture
Our organizational alignment research found that workplace culture accounts for 40% of the difference between high and low performance in terms of revenue growth, profitability, customer loyalty, leadership effectiveness, and employee engagement. Recognizing the importance of workplace culture in terms of business and people performance, now is a good time to check in on how things get done in your company to see if you need to refresh or reset corporate culture to get you where you want to go.
3 Steps for Leaders to Reset Corporate Culture
Here are three research-backed steps for leaders to take to reset corporate culture.
- Put First Things First
Before you take any steps to reshape your corporate culture, make sure to set the strategic context for the kind of culture that will support and drive toward your business priorities. You need your executive team to be fully aligned and committed to the:
— company vision, mission, and values
— ideal target clients
— unique value proposition
— big strategic bets
— strategy success metrics
Strategic clarity is the first step to successfully establishing the culture that will drive high performance across your organization and give your work force the focus and meaning to perform at their peak.
- Prepare for Culture Change
Next you must assess the current state of your corporate culture to determine how healthy, high performing, and aligned it is with your business and people strategies. Culture is like an unwritten code for the way things get done across the organization. When culture is misaligned or interpreted in conflicting ways, performance and engagement is limited and employees feel undervalued and unappreciated.
If you find that employees do not understand the desired team norms or cultural expectations of how works gets done to accomplish your strategic priorities, you as a leader have work to do.
Assess your current culture, define the desired culture, and take steps to close the gaps.
- Secure the Culture with Specifics
The best leaders recognize that, to a certain degree, workplace culture is dynamic. Leaders must continually articulate, monitor, reward, and adjust cultural expectations to stay aligned with strategic priorities. This means keeping specific performance, competency, and behavioral expectations front of mind by integrating them into the entire employee experience in the areas of recruiting, hiring, performance management, succession planning, and reward and recognition processes.
Work with your top performers to define the critical few behaviors and attitudes that align with company’s vision, mission, and day-to-day values. Then integrate them into all of your talent management systems — otherwise behavioral expectations are just slogans and ripe for ridicule.
The Bottom Line
Organizational culture matters — a lot. Make sure you regularly examine the “real” state of your culture so you can maintain high performance and tweak it as necessary. The best company cultures are healthy, high performing, and aligned with the overall corporate strategy. This allows employees and the business to perform at its peak.
To learn more about how to reset corporate culture as a leader, download The 3 Levels of Culture that Leaders Must Align with their Strategy