Driving Culture Change In An Organization Effectively: Practices & Challenges

Organization culture is built over the period of time influenced by business model, customer interactions, leadership behavior. Since culture is built over time, difficult task to change. However once organization learns that the current culture in not helping achieve business objectives, the change becomes mandatory to cope up with new trends, market developments for the organization to survive and set the standards.

The cultural change boils down to people behaviors in the organization. We can change the processes easily but it is tough task to change people behavior. Culture change is a business challenge which has to happen collectively by joining hands with each other in organization. Some of the thoughts shared below.

What's the current situation/culture?: The current situation needs to be assessed carefully by focused discussions, listing down the people concerns, complaints, thoughts. Sufficient time needs to be spent here writing down all the assessment comments, clearly identifying the gaps, problems, come up with clear, simple vision/intent of the new change.

What is the new culture? Set the vision/intent of change needs be clearly mentioned and understood by all. Everyone has to be in agreement with the culture vision. Let all employees understand that and acknowledge & sign it. If any one does not agree to the vision, spend sufficient time talking to the person to understand the different opinion and see there is really a problem/hurdle in change objective.

Driving changes: The leadership needs to be decentralized, and as much as possible this has to be bottom up approach. Since any change boils down daily activities performed by employees, the top management may not well understand these bottom level issues. Hence the leadership needs to be decentralized/flattened to better understand, drive the change. Reorganization may not just help.

Coaching plays an important aspect: To effectively convince the employees,

they need to understand and realize what's going wrong with current organization culture. This can only be done through coaching and not by training. 

Hire an outsider to kick start the organization change, the employees listen to thoughts of a person who has newly joined the organization with vast experience in bringing the change. This simply works but existing employee's attempt to change the culture/process may not be effective or fail subsequently. This is  the reason for teaching new processes, the organization hires outside trainers and employees are trained outside the company campus sometimes!  

Track timely and closely the changes being deployed. It has to be very clear as to what people should be doing in daily activities since all the changes being driven boil down to daily activities. The change is truly in effect once new culture change becomes part of employees' DNA and no guidance, change drivers required. This is when we truly have self organized people/teams.