Signs Your Organization’s Culture Needs to Change

CULTURE has the power to inspire and unite an entire workforce in the service of common goals. It can create meaning and purpose and a positive day-to-day experience while ensuring that the company is well positioned to meet its business objectives.

But when an organization’s culture is negative and dysfunctional, it has the opposite effect. A study from MIT/Sloan found that a toxic culture is by far the strongest predictor of employee attrition.

Signs that an organization needs to evolve its culture can be obvious — business results are suffering, employees are leaving, or recruitment has become difficult. Let’s say your employee survey results across multiple teams tell you that cross-group collaboration is low despite efforts to encourage employees to collaborate. It would be important to dig into what’s fundamentally valued in the culture that might be reinforcing individual performance (or even reinforcing competitiveness) between employees.

When investigating signs that the organization’s culture may be getting in the way of meeting the goals of the business, you need want to:

Examine what the data say. Look out for trends and patterns in any data that you have, for example, employee surveys, exit interviews, customer complaints, and online reviews. If the same things come up time and again, dig deeper to look at them from a cultural perspective.

Explore recruitment and retention difficulties. Your culture might need more attention if people are leaving in higher numbers than in the past, or if you’re having difficulty attracting new candidates to your organization. Even if the culture isn’t actually hostile or toxic, it can still be one that isn’t thriving — and employees and candidates will vote with their feet.

Investigate a lack of employee participation and engagement. If people are showing signs of disengagement — for example, no longer attending company meetings or no longer asking questions — this may be an indication of withdrawal from the culture and a precursor to people leaving. It’s another early sign that you may need to work on your culture.

Consider disconnects between leaders and employees. Another big tell is a lack of connection and alignment between leaders and employees, even though there’s been lots of communication. For example, employees might refer to the company and company leadership as “they” rather than saying “we” or “us.” Or leaders have an us versus them mentality when referring to people in the organization, consistently blaming the workforce or a lack of talent for not achieving business results. Another indicator is when leaders don’t engage with or listen to employees. If leaders aren’t role models for the culture, if they blame others rather than taking ownership themselves, it’s a sign that the culture (and the leaders) need to evolve.

Are you ready to change?

It’s one thing to know that you have a culture problem. It’s a completely different thing to know if the organization is ready to change. Make sure these tactics are in place as you begin to embark on a cultural evolution for your organization:

1. Ensure leaders are the primary voices. The CEO and leadership team must see culture work as critical to the success of the company and be ready to do the work and be the voice of the evolution. Furthermore, they can’t just be talking heads or going through the motions — there must be an authentic commitment from these leaders to do the work. This doesn’t mean that others in the organization can’t also be culture change drivers, but without the CEO and other leaders being involved it will be difficult for the change to be implemented and almost impossible for the change to stick.

2. Have a clear “why.” Because culture feels both personal and deeply rooted, it’s important to have a clear “why” for the culture work. There needs to be a sense of urgency and a clear, meaningful reason for things to change. It’s important to draw explicit connections with the organization’s strategy and purpose. Culture work should always be focused on solving business problems. Be clear about what problems you’re trying to solve through the culture change.

3. Know where you’re starting from. Given that your organization is unique and will start on culture work from your specific place, there are different types of culture work your organization might pursue. You may be trying to understand the current culture. You may be trying to create or form your aspirational culture. You may want to work out how to compare the current culture with the aspirational culture and close the gaps between the two. Or, your culture work may involve making the culture come to life throughout the organization to ensure that the experience of culture is woven throughout the organization. No matter the type of culture work you’re doing, you must be intentional about it. Change is a process that requires intention and time.

Culture is complex, elusive, and multifaceted — just like the humans who create it. And just like the humans who create culture, there’s unlimited potential to evolve your understanding of culture and make work better. If the signs are saying your culture needs to change, for your people’s and your company’s sake, don’t ignore them.

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Laura Hamill is an organizational psychologist, ex-Microsoft director, and Limeade cofounder, an employee experience software company. Through her firm Paris Phoenix Group, she advises companies on how to transform their cultures. She is also a host at the Happy at Work podcast. Her new book is, The Power of Culture: An Economist Edge Book (The Economist Books, Nov. 12, 2024). Learn more at parisphoenixgroup.com

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Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:11 AM
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