What do you do when your Company Culture needs to change?

Few organisations pay enough attention to culture but those that do actively manage it are on average, 30% more productive. That’s a huge dividend for any organisation but when you’re a young, growing business it’s especially important. The key to creating a high-performance company culture is having a road map. Know where you are now, know where you want to go and put the steps in place to get there.

When you break it down there are four key areas that are very telling in mapping your culture:

• Collaboration versus Competition. How is your business positioned? Very collaborative or very competitive? Do people cut each other’s throat to advance or does everyone support everyone else in everything they do, all of the time?
• Structure versus Innovation. How innovative are you and does your structure prohibit innovation? Or are you all over the place, hugely creative but no structure for making it happen consistently?
• Where’s your energy being spent? Managing building the business and success or on constantly challenging situations and failure?
• How are your people feeling? Complacent or anxious, committed or stagnant?

Finally, does everyone think the organisation can change or not?

Once you have an understanding you can plan change in two key areas:

• People – through training, development, redeployment, redundancy or hiring
• Process – Which processes support your staff and which don’t? Do these processes drive the right behaviours and what needs tweaked to ensure they do?  

There’s a fair bit of work in that however, a consistent 30% uplift in productivity will be very worthwhile. The sooner you get it done the sooner the benefits will become clear.