Reinventing your company culture is a huge ask and there's no shortcuts. To help you with a few of the hurdles, here's 4 questions to consider if you're at the start of your journey.
Have you investigated how leadership drives your culture?
Culture is heavily defined by your current leadership, ask yourself, how do senior figures in your brand embody who you are and what you want to become? Today, many brands have a list of company values i.e. Coca Cola's values are: Leadership, Collaboration, Integrity, Accountability, Passion, Diversity and Quality. These values guide Coca Cola both externally and internally, therefore it would be important within Coca Cola that each member of their leadership team engender each of these values and display these in their everyday interactions.
What approach will you take towards organisational structure?
Modern companies are making the decision to elevate different functions of the business to help drive their company culture. There is no 'one size fits all' approach that exists either, it has to be appropriate and directly relatable to the goals of the brand. What does culture have to do with hierarchy? The relationship between company culture and organisational structure sits closely together, consider how a tech company might require agility but if it has the hierarchy you'd typically find in a bank, it would make innovation difficult.
Change is hard, how are you going to choose your battles?
Altering our own behaviour is hard enough, but attempting to do this across a business is going to be an uphill struggle. The first step is to recognise behaviours that support your goals, where are you seeing it and where are you not? This point was inspired by a HBR article which discussed 'Cultural Change That Sticks'. It states that "when choosing priorities, it often helps to conduct a series of 'safe space' discussions with thoughtful people at different levels throughout your company to learn what behaviours are most affected by the current culture - both positively and negatively."
How will you know when you've successfully established the culture you originally set out?
Changes to company culture can't happen overnight, this means that your leaders and senior figures should be patient and not attempt to change culture over a short period of time. Your employees will want to understand what change is happening, why and will definitely form an opinion about this, brands need to listen to create a truly open discussion and listen to the responses intently. It's recommended that you define what success looks like early on, imagine how your brand will appear internally and externally, document this and refer back to it so you can recognise the day where you can actually say, we've changed and we're the company we set out to be.
If you're looking to set your own Customer Experience resolutions for 2017, check out our most recent Guide 'CX Resolutions for 2017', to help empower you with the knowledge to drive CX change.
I wrote this piece in the new year, after being inspired by Rant & Rave's most recent guide 'CX Resolutions for 2017', I investigated what challenges one might encounter in an effort to re-invent company culture.
