Your dedication to company culture will have a greater impact on your company’s success than any other item on your agenda. Building culture starts with purpose-driven culture transformation.
Here are 7 strategies that you can use to develop and implement your Culture Transformation Playbook and start seeing early results in a few months.
1. Define Your Purpose as the Foundation for Cultural Transformation
As any executive culture coach will tell you, culture change begins with getting clear on your purpose. Craft a compelling vision statement that conveys why your company exists beyond profit. (For a team guided vision statement workshop, click here.) This vision statement articulates your purpose and inspires employees as the North Star for all decisions. Moreover, you should engage employees to have regular discussions about how projects connect to this vision.
2. Align Talent Acquisition with Organizational Values
Cultural transformation consulting often reveals that your hiring process should assess not only skills but alignment with your company’s purpose. Hence, asking interview questions that reveal personal values and what incentives motivate them can help identify culturally aligned candidates. Look for people whose personal missions resonate with your organization’s core values and goals. Promote from within rewarding those who personify your culture, making them visible examples of what leadership development looks like.
3. Implement a Purpose-Driven Decision-Making Framework
Corporate culture transformation requires systematic change. With this in mind, you have to walk the talk. Develop a framework that incorporates your company’s mission, vision and values into everyday decision-making. As a leadership coach I ask clients to evaluate options by asking “Does this decision advance our purpose?” Furthermore, I recommend that they ask the same question of others. This approach to culture change management decentralizes culture-building by empowering all employees to make purpose-aligned choices. This is essential for consistent decision making in leadership teams.
4. Celebrate Purpose-Aligned Victories, Along with Financial Wins
Workplace culture creation hinges on celebrating the right behaviors with the right incentives. Consequently, when you develop a regular cadence of recognition for achievements that exemplify your purpose in action, it results in better behavior. CEOs engaged in cultural leadership development share stories of employees who went above and beyond to fulfill the company’s purpose, even when not immediately profitable.
5. Design Physical and Digital Environments That Reinforce Purpose
A fundamental truth is that your environment shapes behavior. To that end, design your workspace to reflect your mission, vision, and values through messaging, imagery, and systems. This makes it easy to have constant reinforcement of how to make decisions. For large or distributed teams, create digital environments and rituals that keep purpose front and center, such as including purpose stories in your monthly Town Hall. This is particularly useful when integrating teams after a merger or acquisition through organizational culture change initiatives.
6. Connect Individual Development to Organizational Purpose
An essential part of employee development should focus on helping employees see how their professional and personal growth contributes to the company’s purpose. As such, it’s useful to create individual development plans that align personal aspirations with organizational goals. When employees understand how becoming their best professional selves advances the mission, you create a powerful engine for culture change and achieve business growth as an outcome.
7. Institute Purpose Alignment into your Company Policies
Learning how to transform workplace culture requires consistent attention and authenticity. Chiefly, company policies must be in alignment with your core values or all of this work and the messages you create will feel like gas lighting to your employees. You can create a Culture Ambassador Committee to review existing and new processes to assess and highlight gaps between stated values and actual company behaviors. This allows for course corrections that demonstrate the organization’s commitment to aligning company culture with strategy consistently. When you show employees you are listening and they feel heard, you know your culture changes are working.
Choose Your Metric: When you invest time and energy into purpose-driven culture transformation, Culture Metrics, Leadership Metrics, and Company Purpose Metrics improve. By incorporating these proven strategies into building your culture, the possibilities are limitless because your employees will want to take you to the moon and back! Click here to set up a consultation now to learn how to choose your metric.
