How to transform your workplace culture

Transforming your workplace culture is essential for success. Do you have the culture you need to achieve your strategy?

Culture eats strategy for breakfast” - Peter Drucker

Annual reviews, forced rankings, outdated competencies — no longer achieve the intended results. Moreover, automation will significantly alter 26% of jobs in Canada and the US in the next five years. Employee engagement is low. However, employees have a transferable talent stack (behavioural strengths, knowledge, skills, and experience). Encourage employees to evolve into new roles and embrace their unique challenges. At the end of the day, this engagement is essential to their success and the success of your business.

According to the Gallup — State of the Workplace Initiative

33% of employees are engaged — they love their jobs and make their organization better every day
51% of employees are not engaged — they are just there
16% of employees are actively disengaged — they are miserable — they may destroy what the most engaged employees build

Here is what to do:

The one thing leaders cannot do is nothing. They cannot wait for trends to pass them by, and they cannot wait for millennials to get older and start behaving like baby boomers.” — Gallup

Start immediately. You can afford mistakes because the system you currently use does not work anyway. As CEO, you must own the responsibility of being the culture leader. You are the most visible leader in a company. However, your involvement in all facets of workplace culture makes an enormous difference. It affects how people feel about the company and how they perform. Be a living model of the culture you aspire to lead.

People pay attention to what the CEO does, not just what the CEO says. Yet, you cannot rely on communications, no matter how inspiring. Moreover, you and your senior leaders must step out by behaving in new ways. Demonstrate a fundamental shift in cultural alignment. Capitalize on elements in your current culture that you want to keep.

Begin with the end in mind”. - Stephen Covey

Call an executive committee meeting. Do you want a high-performance workplace culture?

You need to focus on development and have ongoing coaching conversations. Most importantly, commit to transforming your culture. We can coach you through this transformative period. We transfer knowledge to your team enabling you to build and sustain momentum. Here’s an infographic of the changes needed to become collaborative leaders.

Traditional vs Collaborative Leaders

The workplace is changing. Moreover, leadership is changing. The future is collaborative leaders.

Collaborative leadership is a style of leadership that involves the whole team. While a collaborative leader may still steer the ship, they desire to work with their team by welcoming input, talent and skills from the group. However, collaborative leadership is a collective effort.

How do you know if you or your manager are collaborative?

Read through these eight indicators to see if your leadership style will lead you into the future. The Traditional vs Collaborative Leaders Infographic was created by Stacey Olson-Steele. It is a popular leadership infographic for managers and workplace teams.

Find more education infographics on e-Learning Infographics

Strategy

Use our approach to developing strategy. We use interlinked questions that cascade logically from the first to the last. Develop a set of answers to the following questions.

What are our broad aspirations for our workplace culture?
What are the concrete goals against which we can measure our progress?
Where will we choose to transform our culture?
Where will we choose to reinforce our existing culture?
In our chosen areas, how will we win against the existing culture?
What capabilities are necessary to build and maintain our desired culture?
What are the management systems that we need to build, operate and maintain the key capabilities?

As CEO, your role is to keep the ship on course and ahead of the competition. Generate behavioural reminders about the values, aspirations, and engagements that reinforce its strategy.

Draft a one-page document that sets out the principles of your new culture. Share it with your workforce and seek their input. Redraft and have the senior team sign it. Invite all employees to show their commitment by signing it, too. Do not rush. It will take six months of committed action before employees see that you are committed to a new culture. This exercise will be different than the way you have done things in the past.

Focus on the behaviours critical to driving the desired culture. Help people capitalize on the best aspects of your culture. Focus attention on the critical few behaviours that you believe matter most. Positive sources of energy, pride, and interactions will improve company performance. This approach accelerates the behaviour changes that matter most. You evolve into a high-performance culture that aligns with your strategy. This is more effective than forcing a significant cultural change. These small repetitive actions are the key to success.

Never lose focus on the importance of your role leading the culture

Your persistence in emphasizing the right cultural behaviour will continue to influence the organization long after you have left. Remember that “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

Cultures evolve in informal ways. The evolution is hard to track. Culture can degrade before many people are even aware something bad is happening. CEOs in peak-performing companies work hard to monitor critical behaviours. These include a culture of purpose, coaching, and self-compassion.

Create a culture of “purpose.” Everyone needs to know why the organization does what it does. They need to see the impact your company is having on society.
Create a “coaching culture” that gets engagement. “Employee satisfaction” measures things like how much workers like their perks and benefits. Switch to a culture that values engagement.
Create a culture of self-compassion. Acknowledge your flaws and limitations. Look at yourself from an objective and realistic point of view. We live in a culture that reveres self-confidence and self-assuredness. A better approach to success and personal development: self-compassion. Confidence makes you feel better about your abilities. It can also lead you to overestimate those abilities. Self-compassion includes the advantages of self-confidence without its drawbacks.

Institute a best-fit philosophy

leveraging strengths and managing challenges versus fixing weaknesses

Transform your leaders and managers first. Disengaged people in these roles must be helped or helped out of the organization. Our leadership ladder is a behavioural competency model that develops leaders at three levels of corporate leadership. We support your leadership team in the transformation.

Expand the circle. Create a succession plan. Our analytics will help you identify high potential employees.

Provide an opportunity for everyone to discover their strengths. Offer our SuccessFinder assessment as an option for them. It is the highest ranked assessment tool in the industry with 85% reliability. Our analytics benchmarks candidates against top performers in more than 500 unique roles.

We provide tools that drive the highest level of performance, including our best-fit staffing process. Our employee development plan focuses on competencies staff need to be successful in their role — your team members learn to leverage their unique strengths and to manage their challenging areas.

An engaged employee will want to use the power of SuccessFinder for their career satisfaction and success. Over time, other employees will want to use our approach. Those who do not are likely to be among your actively disengaged group.

We are incredibly passionate about Behavioural DNA and the impact this scientific insight can have on your teams and your business.

Using SuccessFinder, people develop a healthy and deep trust in each other and the team's purpose — they feel free to express feelings and ideas. Everybody is working toward the same goals. Team members are clear on how to work together, how to contribute their unique strengths, and how to accomplish tasks.

Given the changes in the way organizations are operating and the shifting demographic composition of the workforce, offering career development opportunities to employees could be extremely beneficial to employers. Informal and formal learning experiences can provide employees with a more comprehensive skill set and reassurance that their employer recognizes their value. With new knowledge and abilities, employees will be better prepared to handle new technologies and innovations and may be able to contribute to enhancing their organization’s systems and procedures.