Cofounder and Culture Strategist at PROPEL, a coaching and consulting firm helping leaders create amazing workplace cultures.
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Once you get clear on what kind of workplace culture you need to drive your success, you must make the changes quickly, or you could actually make things worse. Many leaders put culture on the back burner as other priorities get their attention, figuring it takes years to change culture anyway, so that can wait.
This is a huge mistake. The truth is, culture change doesn’t have a beginning and end, so measuring it as something that “takes years” misses the point. Your goal should be to continuously align your culture with what makes employees successful, and the faster you do that, the faster you can see results.
For example, back in 2019, two organizations I worked with completed culture assessments and then developed targeted action plans to move their cultures in directions that would make them more successful. Their plans included a combination of long-term, high-impact infrastructure changes, combined with important “quick wins” that would show immediate progress on the culture change.
And then the pandemic hit. Both organizations were about to start implementing their changes in early 2020, when suddenly, like all of us, they had to put everything on hold to figure out how to operate with everyone working from home. That “figuring out” period lasted for quite some time, but one of those organizations didn’t allow that to be an excuse for delaying their culture change. Within two months of the initial lockdown, that organization was already reprioritizing its culture change efforts.
Executives put some of their plans on hold since they didn’t make as much sense in the hybrid workplace environment, but they stuck with several of their plans. The biggest change was a complete overhaul to the project management system, though they also devoted efforts to clarifying core values and putting all of their employees through a conflict resolution training program (delivered virtually, of course).
The other organization intended to start with some training focused on diversity, equity and inclusion, combined with some work to clarify decision-making roles internally and create some new employee recognition programs. But these plans stalled when the pandemic hit, as they turned their attention to how to deliver their services in a virtual environment. There was logic to this decision—a large portion of their revenue came from in-person events, which obviously had to be transformed—but it meant ignoring their culture change for almost two years.
So what happened? In 2022, both organizations decided to gather some new data from staff around culture. The first organization was focused and specific. They designed a short survey to ask employees if they had made progress on the specific areas they were attempting to make better through their culture change efforts. It was a handful of both quantitative and qualitative questions, followed by an employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) question: How likely would you be to recommend someone to work here? The second organization ran a repeat of the culture assessment they completed back in 2019 to see what had changed. This assessment also included the eNPS question.
Their results were starkly different. The first organization saw very positive results in terms of its change efforts. Ninety-four percent of the responses on improvements expressed positive sentiment. Perhaps more importantly, they saw their eNPS go up. It started back in 2019 at an already very high score of +40 (+10 to +20 is considered average/good), but it rose to a +50, despite making all its culture changes in the middle of a pandemic.
The second organization was not so fortunate. Their culture assessment scores showed very little change. In other words, the patterns inside their culture had not changed much in the previous two and a half years—perhaps not surprisingly, given they had put their culture work on the back burner. Their eNPS, however, showed a dramatic decline. Back in 2019, they were at a +5, which was already below average, but when they remeasured, it had dropped 20 points to a -15.
Its culture had not gotten worse—it merely stayed the same, which one might think is a victory, given all the change happening around them. But it was anything but a victory, given the significant drop in employee engagement. Cultural change may not have a beginning or an end, but it requires constant improvement and realignment with what drives success. The organizations that figure out how to maintain progress in their culture change—even if the progress is relatively low impact—will be the ones that attract and retain the best talent in a changing environment.
So how do you go about doing that?
Make "culture friction" an agenda item for your senior team meeting at least once a quarter. Dig into areas where you're seeing performance slip and identify which parts of the culture could be contributing so you can stay on top of them. Also, maintain a backlog of culture change action items that include both high-effort and, almost more importantly, low-effort items. If some of your other culture change efforts stall, you can quickly bring in a new project from the low-effort items on your backlog. That way the change is continuous and stays visible to your employees. Finally, make sure someone in your organization is identified as the "process owner" for culture. In smaller organizations, this could even be the CEO, but if you don't have an individual who knows they are responsible for keeping the culture work on track, it's nearly guaranteed to fall off track.
Culture doesn't require constant attention, but if you're smart about how you manage culture on an ongoing basis, you can reap the rewards of higher engagement and productivity.
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