Five Steps to Transform Your Company Culture
Understanding and then evolving your company’s culture is essential for business success and employee satisfaction. Recent studies and our experience at Proteus show that while many leaders recognize the importance of culture, few feel confident in their ability to shape it effectively. We understand! That’s why we’ve created a practical approach to creating a vibrant and successful company culture based on our work with a variety of organizations around the world.
1. Understand Where You’re Starting From
At Proteus, we define culture as “patterns of accepted behavior and the underlying beliefs and values that promote these behaviors.” The first step in cultural transformation is to understand your current company culture; every organization has its own. Start by examining the behaviors in your organization that may be problematic, and then identify the beliefs and values that are driving those behaviors. When you start with a clear baseline and a shared understanding of the culture as it exists today, you’ll set the stage for meaningful and successful change.
2. Identify and Define Core Values
Next, focus on the core values that you want at the heart of your company’s identity. These values will articulate what you stand for and guide how you conduct business and interact with one another internally. It’s important to select values that align with those already held by your employees – people rarely change their values. This step involves not just listing values, but thinking about how those values will be demonstrated day-to-day. At Proteus, we recommend choosing three to five core values to keep your intentions clear and focused.
3. Translate Values into Behaviors
Once you’ve defined your organization’s values, the next step is to translate these values into specific, actionable behaviors. For example, if “accountability” is a core value, you might define it through behaviors such as taking responsibility for mistakes or consistently meeting goals and standards. The behaviors you identify should be clear, easily observable, and directly linked to the values they represent, so that your employees will be able to understand and integrate them into their daily work life.
4. Prioritize and Modify Key Behaviors
After identifying the specific behaviors you believe best exemplify your values, look at where the current behaviors in the organization are most different from those proposed behaviors. Determine which of the current behaviors, if changed, would have the biggest positive effect on the organization. Once you’ve selected the highest-impact behaviors to target for change, there are many ways to encourage desired behaviors, including:
- Teaching people how to do them
- Providing tools or mechanisms to make them easier to do
- Setting up incentives to reinforce doing them
- Removing barriers that might get in the way of doing these behaviors.
By focusing on a few key behaviors to change, and making those behaviors easy, rewarding and normal to do, you’ll begin to move the culture toward the one you envision.
5. Implement and Integrate Across the Organization
In the final step, you embed these new values and behaviors across all levels of the organization, starting with senior leadership. Communication alone is not enough; it takes a comprehensive strategy, using many of the methods listed above, to ensure the desired behaviors become natural and rewarding and easy to do. Leaders play a critical role in this phase by modeling the desired behaviors consistently over time to reinforce the cultural shift.
These five steps allow you to set the foundation for a company culture that supports your company’s goals while providing employees with a productive and engaging work environment. Having a positive and authentic company culture is a key element of attracting and retaining the best employees – and this approach can help you create exactly that.
Proteus’ transformation experts are ready to support you! Read more about our process or contact us to see how we can help.
