What is your current culture? What is your defined culture? What is your desired culture? When you do a culture audit or assessment, you realize that more needs to be done. Usually, the culture gap helps explore interventions to create the desired culture.
It starts with a culture audit- an exercise we recommend is to be done every two years considering the sensitivity of the people factor. In these tough times, staff attitude and enthusiasm play a key role in winning. Do you sometimes get concerned that some of your team members are dragging their feet instead of sprinting when doing work? Do customers sometimes complain about slow project turnaround? Do some staff approach work with a certain attitude that is not growth minded? How would you summarize your company culture in a few words?
To win you need both hard and soft interventions.
Hard interventions are easy to accomplish – you have documented strategy, work plans, and budgets, which you easily cascade to the managers and they too cascade to their direct reports to the lowest level?
After setting clear KPIs for each staff, how do you help staff adopt habits for high performance?
The fact is a culture of performance takes time to nurture. It calls for sacrifice and change of how things are done. For that reason, not everyone currently on your team can change to new ways and habits. Some of those people, unfortunately, may fight the new interventions and tools. To grow, one must be willing to let go! Some staff may have to go as a result of the new team cohesion for a performance culture intervention.
The culture audit helps to identify the required soft interventions like the alignment of staff purpose to the vision. And defining clear values and how to live them through storytelling. Having a forum to listen to staff is fantastic, after which you identify specific psychosocial support and create a plan that is transformational for each of your team members.
When did you last conduct a culture audit? If your team is having attitude and performance issues, start by looking into the people factor.
Copyright Mustapha B Mugisa, 2020. All rights reserved.
