To change the culture of an entire organization, build a thousand campfires

Researchers and business leaders agree that strong culture is the“secret sauce” that can make or break an organization. However, traditional top-down approaches to culture building often leave employees disengaged and leaders disheartened and wary of unpredictable outcomes. We believe there is a way to build culture that truly reaches and involves the whole organization, not just the top. It requires being crystal clear about your guiding ambition and focusing on the vital few areas of change that drive the greatest impact.

There is a 26% difference between the average engagement score of an organization’s leadership team (84%) and its individual contributors (58%).
United Minds research

Culture is a powerful and sustainable source of advantage. It’s a bigger driver of job satisfaction than salary, and the biggest driver of attrition. Companies with strong innovation cultures are 60% more likely to be innovation leaders1. However, for most organizations, the culture they want feels out of reach. According to the Journal of Financial Economics, 92% of surveyed executives believed that improving corporate culture would increase firm value—while 84% believed their company needed to improve their culture. For employees, the percentage who reported feeling connected to their company’s culture has remained flat at just above 20% for the last four years, according to Gallup.

In our research2 on the employee experience, we observed that, across 50 drivers of employee experience, the further you get from the top of an organization, the less connected and engaged employees tend to feel. This pattern highlights the need for culture work that truly reaches and involves the whole organization, not just the top.

What makes culture work so hard?

The data makes sense when you consider how culture work has always been done—and it illuminates the pain points leaders and practitioners should address to help their organizations build and maintain healthy, high-performing cultures.

PAIN POINT #1

One-time, one-way decisions
Discussions about changing an organization’s culture tend to happen once among a small group. And once decisions are made, the work tends to focus on alerting and aligning people—versus truly engaging them in the process.

PAIN POINT #2

Words over actions
The main work products of culture change are presentations that capture intent—versus targeted actions designed to quickly build momentum and drive measurable progress.

PAIN POINT #3

Mission: impossible
The responsibility of using those work products to galvanize a workforce behind the new culture tends to rest with a few under-equipped leaders—most often leaders in middle and front-line management.

Today’s version of culture work is like building a bonfire: Leaders build it big and build it once. And the further away you are, the less light and warmth you feel. And it’s clear the bonfire approach isn’t working.

To make culture spread, build a thousand campfires

For culture work to succeed, we should think of it like building a thousand campfires. Leaders hand out kindling, so the fire is sparked where people already are. Everyone can create it. Everyone can look after it. And the warmth reaches everyone who needs it. We call it Culture Spark.

How could you do this? We suggest that you follow two principles when thinking about culture change. First, make it simple. Then, help it spread.

Principle #1: Make it simple.

Focus the work on the vital few areas that drive the greatest, most immediate impact on your organization’s culture. In other words, focus on “The Why and The Way” of your organization.

The Why is your guiding ambition. It can be as big as aligning to a new brand or merging two organizations. Or it can be as focused and surgical as a commitment to being the category’s top customer service brand.

The Way is a set of nine critical behaviors you need working toward your ambition. Here’s a canvas showing “The Why and The Way” together. Get in touch if you’d like to go deeper into the nine behaviors and how they come to life to drive your culture.

Nine behaviors that drive your culture. We identified these nine behaviors based on our decades of collective experience and successful culture change engagements with leading organizations. These behaviors act as the building blocks of any organization’s culture. And through these 9 lenses, we can see how well your organization delivers on your guiding ambition—then take targeted action to unblock the path to performance.

Principle 2: Help it Spread.

Work with a bias toward bottom-up action, in addition to top-down communication and role modelling, so that we build agency in the people who have the greatest impact on the employee experience: middle managers. This is critical for three reasons.

They are trusted. Our research shows that managers and their peers are the top two most trusted sources of information. 60% of hybrid knowledge workers report their direct manager is one of the top two influences on their connection to corporate culture.3

They have an outsized impact. Employees who have managers who listen to them and are committed to their success are an average of 3.3X more likely to have positive perception across the 50 measured drivers of employee experience, and 58% less interested in leaving their job tomorrow than employees who don’t.4

They need support. Managers are the gatekeepers of change. Change spreads only with their support. To gain that support, we need to invest in their agency—meaning they need to:

• • See how they contribute to a future they believe in.
  • Have the means to make a positive impact.
  • Feel valued because of their work.

Read more about how United Minds helps the culture spread in the accompanying case study.

Case in point: “In it to win it” – driving a culture shift in an automotive business

Following a strategy pivot, leaders of a global automotive supplier decided it was time to re-invent the company culture to build a more driven and customer-focused mindset to generate new energy and enable long-term business growth. They partnered with United Minds to define a new Corporate Blueprint, better aligned to the changing industry landscape, and drive a culture transformation for teams across 7 geographies on four continents. The new culture was co-created with leaders based on input from employees across the globe. Using a proven culture methodology, three key behavioral shifts were defined, rooted in company’s four values, and described via actionable behaviors. After 2 years, more than 80% of white collar staff report using the new culture as a guide to set behavioral expectations with their teams, and leaders report feeling more aligned as a business.

The plan to shift culture focused on communication, capacity building and integration into processes and ways of working (e.g. leader communications, competencies framework and performance management). The “In it to win it“ creative platform captured the KPI-driven and proactive spirit of the new culture, generating new energy and commitment among employees, and offering a shared vocabulary for conversations about the culture shift. A global communication campaign and change plan were developed, but each region and location were encouraged to pilot various tactics to finetune the approach and build a plan that would resonate most with their local teams. Ongoing measurement throughout the program (pulse surveys, annual all employee survey, focus groups) allowed them to track progress and ensure continuous improvement against key metrics.

Empowering people managers became the foundational driving force of this change. United Minds worked with global and regional leadership teams to align on the key objectives of the culture shift, commit to leading and modelling the change, and then adapt action plans for each geography. Over 300 team leads across the company participated in full-day workshops “Leading in the new culture”, giving them the tools and strengthening their confidence in driving behavior changes in their teams.

A “Living the culture” toolkit was developed for people managers based on workshop feedback, giving them actionable advice, templates and tools for embedding new behaviors in day-to-day work. One such tool was a specially developed culture board game engaging teams in reflections and conversations about personal and team behaviors. The game created a team bonding experience to drive awareness of the new culture, lower resistance to the change and increase employees’ motivation to adopt the new behaviors. On the other hand, qualitative assessment of adherence to the new behaviors were embedded into the performance management process, rewarding and reinforcing the behavior change.

Engaging and equipping people managers to lead the change and embed the behavior shifts into the day-to-day work has been a critical element of this culture change, fostering employee engagement, building alignment and propelling the company to achieve its strategic business priorities.

By making culture work more simple and focusing efforts on specific outcomes, this approach makes culture tangible and actionable, at the same time connecting the changes in behavior to intended business results. Galvanizing employee communities across the organization to co-create and spread culture requires leaders to part with the idea that they need to control culture and allow their teams to carry the spark, but the result — empowered, engaged teams inspired by your strategic intent — is definitely worth the risk.