With an increasing emphasis placed upon culture in organisations, leaders can all too often fall into the trap of looking for quick-fix or band-aid solutions.
The problem with this is that there are no quick-fixes or band-aids when it comes to the health of your organisational culture. Instead, it requires a correct diagnosis that addresses the underlying causes.
In other words, before you can enter into any meaningful work on building clarity around your desired culture, it’s important to develop a baseline understanding as to where you are right now. This means doing the work to know what’s going on in your business.
The Know Your Culture section of the framework outlines key areas to consider and suggested ways to further your baseline understanding. You can then use this data to focus on building clarity around the desired culture through supported conversations.
These supported conversations take all the inputs to diagnose toxic patterns that exist and look through a different lens to identify what you want the culture to look like. You want to find the right “cure” that addresses the underlying causes of what is “ailing” your organisation rather than just treating “symptoms.”
Cohesive Teams Build Positive Cultures
With a cohesive team and a consistent and clear plan, leaders and their direct reports have absolute clarity on their expected behaviours and a development pathway that will get them there.
This focus on culture will not only deliver improved mental wellness, it will also deliver hard results measurable in terms of efficiency, retention, safety statistics and ultimately profit.
According to a recent Forbes business article, organisations that focus on building positive culture makes for ‘happier’ employees and happy employees have a profound impact on business results.
In fact, research indicated that these organisations outperformed their competition by an average of 20%.
Watch this short video to hear from Justin Petrie, of the McConnell Dowell | Decmil Joint Venture, on his experience taking a step aside to really see what is happening within his team and actively making positive change to grow team cohesion.
Achieving cultural change is some of the hardest work you will ever do. As a starting point, we have outlined some critical high-level requirements.
What’s needed is a visionary leader and a committed leadership group working together every step of the way.
High-level requirements:
A baseline understanding of what’s happening in your culture as outlined in Know Your Culture
Working together as a cohesive leadership team and having robust conversations about what’s going on to diagnose the real issues
Identifying what you want your healthy organisational culture to look like
Designing a map for your aspirational culture and committing to it as a group
Communicating the changes necessary to achieve it
Call To Action
There are a lot of moving parts to get to a point where positive culture exists within the organisation. Engaging your leadership team in a shared vision and plan will help to drive the culture change you want to see.
Create cohesion amongst your leadership team on what the desired culture looks like, and commitment from the top level leaders.
Build understanding amongst the group around why this work is so important and the impacts that having a focus on workplace mental health and wellness will have on your organisation.
Create a safe environment within the team for important and robust conversations that allow them to create a bespoke solution together.
Ultimately, you want your leadership team to map and roll out the cultural change, modelling the behaviours that will drive change within your organisation, gaining employees’ trust and commitment to achievement of the shared goal.
Review The Integrated Approach and visit the Lysander website to see how they put these critical success factors into action in the Culture Strategy workshops.
Taking it Further
Once you have built clarity on your current reality and the way forward towards positive cultural change, a sound communication strategy should form part of your culture map to help you define the “Why” and build clarity into your communications.
Review the page on Communications Strategy and WorkSafe’s WorkWell Toolkit Strategy Page for more on developing and communicating a mental health and wellness strategy for your organisation.
You could also take a look at the Inspirational Leadership page to build capability in your leadership team to deliver the message. This is a key leadership style which when developed, allows you to galvanise groups of people, directing them toward a shared vision or change goal!