How to Change Organizational Culture Successfully

Running a thriving business means mastering its culture, and that isn't easy. According to Deloitte's Global Human Capital Trends Report, 82% of organizational leaders view a strong culture as a potential competitive advantage, but only 19% feel their organization has gotten the culture right.

Many senior leaders see problematic behaviors in their organizations but aren't sure how to change the culture. The good news is that organizational change can be simpler than you might think. In this post, we’ll walk you through key tips on how to change organizational culture successfully.

Let's get into it!

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Leading Change at Every Level

• Improve the ability to lead change initiatives
• Generate support for change efforts
• Understand effective change leadership behaviors

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Assess Your Current Culture

To change organizational culture effectively, first understand its current state. Start by engaging your leaders in defining your organization's primary performance priorities, such as increasing revenue or delivering best-in-class customer service.

• Identify behaviors. Identify the behaviors you see across the organization. Consider both key strengths you'd like to build on and weaknesses that are impacting your ability to reach your performance targets. Identify three to five of each.
• Find the root cause. You need to know why these behaviors are happening if you want to change them. Spend some time thinking through the beliefs and attitudes that are driving the behaviors you're seeing.
• Survey all levels of your organization. Be sure to get plenty of input from people across the organization during the assessment phase. Talk with mid-level managers and frontline employees who can give you a clear picture of current issues and underlying attitudes. The last thing you want is to launch a cultural change initiative that falls flat because it doesn't square with the reality of what's happening in the organization.

For example, suppose every project involves endless rounds of meetings, with every stakeholder getting multiple opportunities to weigh in on potential issues. In conversation with your employees, you might hear project managers express a perception that each project needs to be flawless before it is shipped out. Together, these findings can help you identify the underlying causes of challenges in your organizational culture.

Define Your Vision

Many leaders can see problems in their culture, but they can't define the culture they want instead. Getting specific about your target culture makes all the difference to the success of your initiatives.

Examine the weak areas you identified earlier, and pinpoint the behaviors you'd expect to see if your culture were at its best. Then, get behind those behaviors as you did earlier. What attitudes and beliefs would drive your people to show the behaviors you want, day in and day out? Be specific and detailed.

Create SMART Goals

Now that you know the behaviors and attitudes you want, work backward from there. State the key takeaway, then define SMART goals (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely) to help each of your organizational units begin demonstrating the expected behaviors.

Suppose customer service is a weakness. SMART goals might include introducing customer service training for client-facing roles and reviewing processes to ensure all customers have a consistent experience. If you've heard that CSRs aren't clear on why customer service matters to the organization's overall mission, you might add consistent messaging emphasizing the importance of delighting customers.

While all areas of the organization should work together to support cultural change, choose SMART goals appropriate to each area. Using the customer service example, senior leaders may focus on communicating the new priority of customer delight, while CSRs may focus on regular customer service training. Everyone should understand their role in making the new culture shift toward success.

Build Motivation

Sending out a company-wide email about your new culture initiative won't change anything. To achieve real cultural change, you need to engage your employees in the process.

Ensure that managers discuss how their direct reports' work aligns with the organization's new cultural initiatives during regular performance conversations. Managers should work with direct reports to set performance goals aligned with these priorities.

To keep your employees motivated, build communication skills and coaching into your work routine. Schedule regular informal one-on-one conversations so team members can keep you up to date on their progress toward performance goals. These sessions are the perfect time to celebrate successes, process setbacks, and answer questions.

Track Results

Don't just hope for success. While many organizations go all-in on creating an elaborate change management plan, few identify success measures to determine whether their initiatives are working. Create a system to track results across the organization, so you can tell whether your plan is having the intended impact.

Think back to the behaviors you want to see in a healthy culture. From those behaviors, you can define specific success measures to assess your change initiative.

Let's go back to our customer service example. Suppose you recently took a look at your company's Net Promoter Score and it's currently sitting at a not-so-hot -20. From there, you can easily determine a success measure for a strong customer service culture – raising your NPS to +70.

Trust the process. In both your coaching conversations and your efforts to measure results across the organization, understand that change can take time. It rarely happens in a day. So continue to monitor results and respond accordingly, and you'll be well-positioned for success.

Your Turn

Changing organizational culture can be an enormous challenge. The key is to be crystal clear about the outcomes you want to see. First, get a clear picture of your organizational culture, then define the specific behaviors you want to see. Next, have each department set SMART goals to achieve the target behaviors, and coach employees one-on-one to help everyone succeed.

Organizational change impacts everyone. That's why HRDQ offers a library of change management training resources to help you successfully manage change at every level of the organization. To get started, check out Leading Change at Every Level. This course equips leaders with the tools to enact change successfully and helps ensure that every employee in the organization is ready to adopt it.