Benchmarking your culture is the first step on the road to being able to assess and improve it. The behavioural norms in your business are shaped by your organisation’s understanding of what is – and isn’t – appropriate. These shared assumptions and values guide how people interact with one another, whether leaders or peers. Identifying these behaviours can help identify, and benchmark, the kind of culture that exists.
Creating the benchmark
We use the Human Synergistics model to create a snapshot of the culture of your organisation. It’s called the Organizational Culture Inventory (OCI) and it identifies 12 different behavioural norms, identifying those that people think are required by their organisation.
These cluster into three distinct types of culture:
1. Constructive 2. Passive/defensive 3. Aggressive/defensive
Each employee is asked to identify what they feel are the behaviours expected to ‘fit in’ in their organisation. These individual responses are then combined to profile the shared behavioural expectations within your organisation, along with how commonly-held or ‘intense’ they are. So you’ll be able to see not only what kind of behaviours are expected, but how may agree on those behaviours.
A ‘low intensity’ culture reflects little agreement on what those behaviours are, whereas a ‘high intensity’ culture is one where the majority agree on the behaviours expected by the business.
Building a team culture
Is there a formal process in place in your organisation to build and grow high-performing teams?
So often we work with businesses where teams are assembled operationally without taking the time upfront to help them learn how one another like to work best and interact with one another.
We can help you build a high-performing, supportive, empathic team culture.
We can coach your teams through assessments designed to help them really uncover and understand themselves and their teammates. We’ll work alongside your teams to observe and assess them, before identifying their individual personality types and ways of working.
Our 5-step plan for creating culture change that really lasts
Creating culture change that lasts isn’t easy. Our five steps lay out a clear roadmap to delivering change that really sticks. Depending on the scale of your organisation we’re able to deliver it alongside you in-house, or give you the tools and processes to deliver it yourself.
1. Take the temperature
Before we can help you identify the change that’s needed, we need to find out what’s working – and what’s not. We’ll help you take the temperature of your organisation – running assessments of your organisation and your people. We can come in and do this for you if you need us to, or give you the support and tools you need to do it yourself.
3. Lead right from the front
To make sure change runs through the whole business, we have also designed (and can run) a training course for managers that kicks off with a workshop and a series of weekly updates and group coaching resources while the change programme is running.
5. How do you measure up?
How are you going to measure the improvements you’ve made? We’ll build in reportable metrics that will show you quantifiable differences being made across the business.
2. Make change happen
We create and run a series of workshops to help the leadership team fully identify the current situation, brief them on our assessment and recommendations, work through what needs to change, and ultimately own and champion the culture changes required.
4. Communicate, communicate, communicate
Good internal communications is the secret weapon in most organisations. We can help you devise and rollout a company-wide communications strategy that will play to your organisation’s strengths, and create ownable buy-in from the bottom-up.
