How to create an enterprise culture (difficult in seven steps)

Introduction

Managers tend to cringe when they hear the "culture", a word, because the cultures seem so mysterious and organic, and are one of the parts of the organization that managers can not control. At least that's the myth, but it is actually possible to design the culture of your organization and then set to create in simple ways. The problem is that changing a culture takes time, the participation of all members of the organization, a long-term plan and careful monitoring.

Step 1: What Do You Want Culture?

Probably the hardest part of the process of cultural change is to decide what kind of culture you want to have in your organization. It should be a strict hierarchy, or perhaps a democracy, or a loose federation of experts, or something completely different? How do people make decisions? How will resources be distributed? What are the penalties for failure and rewards for success? It will not be able to answer these questions all at once, because it will evolve over time, but you need to think about what kind of culture you want to work in - the culture that is likely to attract the people you need to reach your goals. This visioning cultural works best if you can engage all members of the organization and, if everyone feels committed to the project and shares the same vision of how they want to work, and how they treat others.

Step 2: Which culture do you have?
Now, it is necessary to characterize the existing culture - after all, do not know which way to go if you do not know where you are. Need to find out what frustrates people, what makes them feel good, that helps them do their jobs and what holds them back. And the only way to obtain this information is to ask as many people as possible. You can ask people in many ways: through surveys or focus groups or interviews, or just around the water cooler and talk with people. Write down what you hear and analyze for common themes - are the starting point for change.

Step 3: What needs to change?
Now that you know where you are and where you go, you can start planning the changes to get from point A to point B. You can plan for change in two ways: first by making small changes easy to get momentum rolling, or facing big changes important to obtain the first dramatic success, or a combination of both. But although the decision to do so, you must identify all the negative aspects of your culture that you want to delete the current, the positive parts of mainstream culture that you want to preserve and grow, and the visionary aspects of your culture that you need to create. If you write this in detail, you will have a roadmap of changes to make ned to create the new culture.

Step 4: How can cause changes?
It 's all very well to imagine a new culture, and to prioritize the changes needed, but how do you actually get a culture to change? Well, it is easy to describe the methods, but more difficult to implement. For every cultural change that you want to do, try to identify the top five organizational features that prevent you from making the change and start trying to eliminate them. And at the same time, identify the five most important characteristics that favor the change and start promoting these characteristics. You are trying to establish both a push and a pull to go to the new culture: the desire is to eliminate bad practices and shooting is to start rewarding good practice to get the new behavior started.

Step 5: Change How can you measure?
As you start the program of cultural change, how do you know you're making some progress? Do not you just look around and guess what - you have to find a way to measure the changes so that you can say what measures are working. You can get accurate measurements of changes in a number of ways: using employee surveys, interviewing employees, or through focus groups. You can also track changes using indirect measures, such as sick days, or employee productivity or product quality metrics, all of which are sensitive to cultural issues and change as changing your culture. And the most important part of your measurement program is to establish a baseline and monitoring measures over time. Often the trend of the measurements will give strong clues about where to direct your efforts.

Step 6: How long will it take?
So, how long should you give to make a cultural change? It depends on the extent of the change, how many people the effects of the depth of the change, as they must change their behavior, and their motivation to change. As a general rule, you should provide in the past weeks to make changes in the culture of a team in recent months to change the culture of a department, and in the years to change the culture of an entire organization. The rate of change can vary from one situation to another. Some organizations are beginning to change slowly, and then pick up speed, as the changes settle in and reinforce each other. Other organizations make radical changes very quickly, but then require a long time to establish themselves in the culture changes and become self-sufficient

Step 7: When did you do?
Organizations that are in constant cultural change are not healthy - that ends with the energy they consume in the process of change. So it's important to have a goal in mind. "We have reached the culture that we have decided to build" a way to declare, And the only reliable way to decide when you've reached the goal thanks to your measurements. For example, you might decide that your goal is to increase employee satisfaction to 85% for six months, or product defects to decrease by 30% for one year. With business goals like these, you can decide how to allocate your time and resources, predict how the change is going, and decide when it's time to declare the complete change of culture and move to the next task .......