Five things you can put in your change planning for 2024 that will support cultural shifts.
I recently read a quote claiming, "Culture is changed one conversation at a time."
I disagree! Great conversations with nurturing leaders and inspirational peers will help individuals grow and become motivated, but individuals don’t change cultures; tribes change cultures.
Tribes change organisational culture.
The person instigating negative corridor conversations about your change delivery is ineffectual if they talk to themselves. They only gain power when they have followers.
To join the corporate culture conversation, you must first understand what culture means.
A quick Google search provides some excellent, succinct descriptions; for me, it’s simply:
How we get stuff done around here
How our customers and employees feel about how we get stuff done around here.
The culture of a company will grow organically over many years. Changing that culture can also take many years. Replacing the people you don't want with people you do want is essential but not quick and easy.
At the re-invention stage, organisations will develop values and mission statements, often supported by a fancy graphic. They’ll laminate it, put it in meeting rooms, and proudly display it in reception for visitors. But they're just words. And what does "Customer First, or Innovation Mindset" mean anyway?
How do you get everyone to live these values in what they do daily?
When employees embrace the culture and values, it will flow into their lives outside of work. That’s when you’ve nailed it. Do you think a Google employee is only creative and motivated at work?
When working at MLC, I was part of a project to embed responsibility for risk in the culture.
The ask, "Risk management is everyone’s responsibility."
We made sure the message related to actions and that it was tangible and easily understood. It was important we communicated activities and outcomes, rather than ideas or processes.
When you teach someone to take acction if they see something that could result in an accident, you’ll see them alert a stranger their shoelace is undone on their journey home.
Behaviour like this changes a person and ultimately changes the company culture.
When I worked at The Star, we were all about going the extra mile and providing guests with “thrilling experiences.” I’ll bet that resulted in parents organising some great kids' birthday parties!
Planning and delivering organisational change are the subject matter for many book chapters. However, let’s look at what you, a single Change Manager or Change Team, CAN do to help grow culture within an organisation differently.
I recently read New Power by Jerry Heimans and Henry Timms. Although it’s not a book about Change Management, I found the case studies about global movements such as # #metoo or #blacklivesmatter. and companies that grew via viral marketing or crowdsourcing (UBER, AIRBNB), extremely relevant to best practices in Change Management.
Highly motivated, engaged participants working as part of a collaborative tribe towards a shared goal?
Isn’t that Change Management nirvana?
Reading the book, I thought about the transferrable learnings.
Here are my five top tips.
1) Open up communication and collaboration channels
Use what you have—Yammer, Viva, Workplace, Teams, if nothing else, a whiteboard. Encourage open conversations about whatever you’re working on. Start by using these collaboration tools for general chatter. Set out your guidelines for acceptable behaviour upfront, then encourage chat. You want to see pics of Friday drinks, the failed cupcakes baking attempt, someone getting caught in the rain, and a fun team event. Connect people with people stuff.
When team members see a positive reason to open Yammer or Teams, they become comfortable using these channels to collaborate for work.
The ability to stay connected on smart devices allows people to collaborate anytime. Not so they are at the beck and call of their office, but so they can more easily juggle work-life balance. You can easily be on a hands-free team meeting while driving to pick the kids up from school. Emails isolate us. Collaborative tools connect us as people.
A recent Google study on culture cited that the most important factor for employees was that they felt psychologically safe at work. Promoting open conversation on internal social media platforms could help foster and build that psychological safety zone.
2) Make comms about “user experiences.”
People like to read information about people. Particularly people they know. Describing how the Customer Service Team have reduced complaints and increased their NPS scores by using Twitter will get read more than a quick reference guide on corporate use of social media.
As a Change Manager, if you post learning videos on SharePoint and people can watch them when convenient instead of running webinars, you're stealthily teaching people to take self-serve information and take responsibility for their learning journey.
Those little activities and actions we drip feed during portfolio Changes can ultimately impact organisational culture.
3) Develop cross-functional chapters or centres of excellence
Encourage collaboration across skill sets. The Change Practice meeting. EA collaboration forum. Business Analyst network? As well as working on their projects, encourage collaboration and sharing in skills-specific chapters. This is a common feature of Agile project deployment. You may not be aware of it if you’re not working in Agile or Continuous Delivery.
There is a sense of belonging in a peer group, where you can brainstorm, discuss challenges, and share wins, which is highly effective. Online collaborative tools keep the momentum going when teams are geographically scattered. I love this video from ING, which explains Agile chapters.
4) Change Ambassadors/Change Champions/Superusers
Assemble your front line.
I’ve used Change Champions in many projects. Change Champions help to roll out a specific initiative, but they have more value than a single roll-out.
At TAL, we ran a Change Champions education initiative for dedicated change ambassadors. They were given basic training in functional change, e.g. ADKAR, and we helped them understand how to roll out our comms, deal with change resistance, and drive adoption. They were our first-line communicators for any business change, and our eyes and ears wer on the ground. Change Champion activities must be measured and encouraged as part of their KPI's. It won't work if they’re just enthusiastic volunteers.
Heimans and Timms in New Power gave me something else to consider with my Change Champions
Previously I'd always been very prescriptive about how change champions should use delivery messaging. I’d prepare comms and training and explain how I would like delivery to happen. New Power demonstrates that Change Advocates do better when managing their chapters themselves.
They know their immediate tribe better than you, so you should leave it up to them to decide the best delivery and communication methodology for that tribe…something for me to consider for future rollouts.
5) Develop a certification program
Think about an Office 365 roll-out. How many areas of new learning are there? Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Viva? If you have a digital transformation there could be hundreds of modules to learn. If you develop basic competency levels and accreditation, would staff feel more motivated to learn more about all areas? If staff upskill in tools not directly related to their role it's easier to cover staff shortages and for people to take secondments.
Do you think EA’s might proudly display their PowerPoint accreditation certificates or trophies on their desks? You’d be confident of a level of ability, and there might be some healthy competition too. Add some of these achievement goals to KPI’s, to get more bang for your buck.
The accreditation may mean nothing outside your organisation, but it has meaning inside your tribe. The tribe that forms the culture.
I highly recommend encouraging learning outside of someone’s current job role, too. Educate an administrator in Excel Analytics (Certificate 1, 2 & 3 😊 ), and they could work towards becoming a BA. Internally developing staff, mentoring and being mentored is hugely valuable in creating the right tribe mentality to drive the organisational change you desire.
There is so much more to say, discover and discuss on this subject, but for now, let me stop with these five taster ideas.
1) Open up communication and collaboration channels
2) Make comms about “user experiences.”
3) Develop cross-functional chapters or centres of excellence
4) Change Ambassadors/Change Champions/Superusers
5) Develop a certification program
A final note. An army of amazing change professionals can do very little to effect change where active, genuine sponsor support from the top is not evident.
What do you think? Have you successfully run a program of organisation change? I’d love to get your feedback on my thoughts. Also, please share with your network to help deliver better change Management.