Create a Culture of Change at Work in 5 Research-Backed Steps

A Culture of Change at Work to Support Short- and Long-term Success
The ability to create a culture of change at work is not about more corporate communications or change management training. While both can help, building an agile culture is about fundamentally reshaping how work gets done — especially when the stakes are high and the future is uncertain.  In healthy and high performing organizations, change is not episodic. It is woven into daily behaviors, leadership expectations, decision making, and operating rhythms.

Why You Need a Culture of Change at Work
Strategy only delivers results when culture reinforces it. Without that cultural alignment, performance gains are limited and short-lived.  In fact, organizational alignment research found that strategy and culture alignment factors account for 71% of the difference between high and low performing companies in terms of:

• Revenue growth
• Profitability
• Customer loyalty
• Leadership effectiveness
• Employee engagement

Savvy leaders know that the business practices, team norms and company values that drove success yesterday rarely sustain it tomorrow. Markets shift, technologies evolve, and customer expectations rise — often faster than formal strategies can keep up.

A culture of change at work prepares the organization to adapt ahead of the curve by encouraging employees to continually rethink how they think, behave, and work vis-a-vis your strategic priorities. When strategic-driven change becomes a shared mindset rather than a disruptive event, innovation accelerates and strategy execution keeps pace with strategic ambition.

Five Immediate Steps to Create a Culture of Change

If your organization wants change to translate into results, culture cannot be left to chance. Decades of organizational culture evaluation research show that long-term performance improves only when leaders intentionally reshape behaviors, norms, and systems. These five steps define where to start.

1. Clarify Your Purpose
   Employees who find meaning in their work are more engaged, perform at higher levels, and adapt more readily to change. Leaders must clearly articulate why the organization exists and where it is headed. When people understand and believe in the mission and vision, change feels less like disruption and more like progress. As a result, change resistance declines and commitment increases because employees can see how their work contributes to a future they value.
   
   Do you have enough clarity and meaning to drive alignment and commitment?
   
   
2. Re-think Needed Behaviors
   Identify the specific behaviors required to bring your strategy to life. Be explicit about how those behaviors differ from what people do today, how mindsets must shift, and which systems and business practices need to change to reinforce them. Until processes, incentives, and decision rules consistently reward and reinforce the new behaviors, old habits will continue to win.
   
   Are behavioral expectations clear and aligned enough to get you where you want to go?
   
   
3. Take a Multi-Faceted Approach
   Project postmortem analyses tell us that building a culture of change is a cumulative effort, not a single initiative. The way work gets done must reinforce change, not undermine it. Progress comes from addressing multiple organizational levers at once — securing genuine leadership commitment, having aligned decision rights, developing employees with targeted, practical learning, communicating early and often, creating space for open dialogue, and aligning performance management to reinforce desired behaviors.
   
   Are you taking a holistic enough approach to ensure that change becomes durable rather than episodic?
   
   
4. Build Flexibility
   When groups become overly specialized or uniform, their capacity to adapt diminishes. A culture of change thrives on flexibility — enabling the organization to pivot quickly, respond to evolving challenges, and seize new opportunities before competitors do. Develop shared goals across functions to encourage cross-functional collaboration with diverse, interdisciplinary teams.
   
   Are you empowering teams to make it happen?
   
   
5. Establish Continuous Learning
   When continuous learning is embedded in the culture, employees actively seek smarter, more effective ways to work. Leaders must role-model adaptability. Culture follows behavior, not slogans.  A culture of change requires leaders to show learning in public — acknowledging what they do not know, adjusting course when evidence changes, and inviting challenge.
   
   Are your leaders open enough to new ideas, able to quickly adapt to change, and ready to pivot?

The Bottom Line
Change management consulting experts know that a true culture of change is built through clarity, credible leadership behavior, aligned systems, distributed capability, and relentless learning. When these elements reinforce one another, change stops being a fad or a threat and becomes the normal way work gets done.

If you want to learn more about how to create a culture of change, download 3 Levels of Culture that Must Be Addressed for Lasting Culture Change

by Tristam Brown: CEO

Tristam Brown is an executive business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.