culture
Timeline: 6 months
Team: CEO, Corporate Development Manager, External Marketing Consultant, Project Manager
As Project Manager, I was responsible for:
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research and data collection
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trust-building with each department
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onboarding middle managers
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recruiting ambassadors
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planning the timeline of the project
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synthesizing feedback
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strategizing for the way forward
Driving changes in culture is often top-down or driven by a marketing narrative. Instead, let's look at what is present in each department's interaction with the company. What emerges when we align our personal values with the company's. Acknowledging that the employee experience is largely driven by how a company handles change, it is vital that the need for change is seen equally necessary by employees and leadership.
How might we get employees to trust change within an organisation?
Designing for a Culture of Trust
Bottlenecks to change
A mid-sized company needed to create a way to improve workplace culture for their employees because their recent employee satisfaction survey revealed that a significant percentage of employees felt undervalued and disconnected from the company.
The problem was first discovered when the new CEO was ushered in and began restructuring the Sales and Marketing department. In informal conversations, the corporate development department observed more than half indicated leaving for a better offer.
Workplace culture was alluded to as the primary reason, as many employees felt as though the various business units functioned in silos, and they were exposed to very little culture outside their immediate department.
Initially, the management wanted to start a culture programme based on the assumption that employees were still engaged. However, on digging deeper, it became evident that more than half had quietly checked out, only doing their daily duties without much interest or hope in the culture.
This disconnect indicated a larger problem - the employees had been feeling unseen and unheard for a long time, resulting in resistance to new changes or improvements.
Re-creating our values
In an attempt to unify the people and business perspectives, we attempted to start with the people. Our guiding mantra: Mindset of our people determines how they work.
Part 1
Value Finding Workshops
We invited individuals to introspect on their own needs for growing at the company. Based on individual foundations, we asked them to co-create their team’s agreement. When the team/department had a commitment towards each other, we encouraged the departments to root themselves in the unique value they provide to the business.
They were engaging and committing at 3 levels:
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What do I promise to be?
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What do I promise to my team?
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What do I promise to the organisation?
Part 2
Consolidation to inform Strategy
With the commitments from each department submitted, the team analysed main themes drawn from narratives that seemed inspiring and ambitious. The analysis gave the company’s leadership a purview of the employee expectations, unmet needs and gaps in their experience.
Employee’s input shaped:
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Main cultural themes (that formed the values and anti-values)
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Renewed purpose, goals and strategy
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Company’s commitment to its People
Part 5
Implications of a new culture
When thinking of embedding culture, we thought about:
Narrative
We deemed the story our people told about the company and how they experienced themselves at work more important than the “values”. As we collectively agreed that the words used to showcase our values can be interpreted in many ways.
Instead of focusing on the narrative set by leaders and carried by managers, we zoomed in on how each person plays with the essence of our values to make it their own. This reflected each employee’s experience, strengthening overlaps and bridging gaps in individual values and the company’s purpose.
How did this help?
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Created genuine connection through a shared story, from leadership to the newest team member
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It allowed for culture to evolve with time and employee contribution through individual (growth) stories
Scalability
With ambitions to grow in neighbouring countries, the team intended for the culture to resonate with their team in these new regions. By approaching the narrative and values in an non-rigid way, the team leads felt open to tailor practices to the needs of each team. To make aligning with the company’s overarching values possible, the team highlighted accessibility of this information and the need to design strategy documents, company-wide communications, onboarding plans and learning trajectories that weave into each other.
Perpetuity
After putting in the work to co-create a culture of shared ownership, the team recognised that these efforts needed to stand the test of time, including closing culture transformation as a ‘project’. Without the facilitated effort and a dedicated team, there would be a tendency to retreat to old, traditional ways. The idea is to create an ecosystem where the culture sustains itself, rather than relying on periodic interventions.
To keep momentum and responsiveness, two suggestions were made:
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The team would remain active for a year to plan periodic pulse checks, regular reviews, and iterative workshops to create a rhythm of feedback loops.
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Leaders would need to commit to leading by example (mainly, each one understands their role in perpetuating culture). They would actively participate in getting trained in advanced leadership, understand how to conduct value-aligned reviews and welcome career growth for the individuals in their teams.
Part 3
Pulse Check
During a quarterly company-wide update event, the CEO shared the work-in-progress materials co-created with their input, allowed for questions and answered them. This was an essential step to encouraging team morale by making employees feel seen, hearing their feedback and noting it to consider in the iteration.
Part 4
Review & Iterations
Once the values were finalised, we asked a random selection of people from the company: What pops up for you when you see the values?
“They [Values] are and feel bigger, more encompassing than the previous set of values that we had. This definitely resonates with me. On the other hand, what things are we not focusing on? What are things that we think are less important? It’s easy to place everything under the umbrella of these values but getting a very clear distinction on what we want and moreover, what we do not want to see in our organisation could be interesting.” ~Lead Software Architect
Based on what behaviours to encourage, we got feedback to share what would be value deflators (or anti-values) of culture. Where does a value start to fail? How do we identify it?
Scoping and Phases
Upon starting the culture transformation initiative, the team realised the need to approach this process in phases rather than one big solution to deliver.
This realisation birthed several smaller interconnected initiatives that would later become an integrated whole of the umbrella culture.
Workshops Design & Facilitation, Vision & Values Alignment, Test & Iterate | 6 months
Refreshing company branding and values, as often as these are thought of as renewal of culture, are top-down efforts to embed a new narrative. But culture is co-produced by the people through their daily action and rituals, decision-making, what is prioritised, behaviours that are welcomed, tolerated and punished, the stories people tell at work and about their work, etc.
With this understanding, co-creating a new culture seemed like a collective effort - where individuals in each team could willingly contribute to the company’s narrative that is parallelly evolving with their input.
We dove into what people value as individuals and how those values show up in teams. This enabled us to go beyond superficial words as company values that meant little to those who had not conceptualised them. Co-creation of culture was set up as a series of activities to get vulnerable, think collaboratively and participate in working as an aligned whole.