What are the best ways to involve procurement in a culture change initiative?

A quick tip I learned over years doing qualitative and quantitative research: never ask for people's own behavior and culture. Most people will provide a "conformity" answer (the one they think it politically correct). Ask what they see everybody else doing... people are happy to share unfiltered versions of what other do. This is particularly useful when assessing current cultural configuration, as you will receive better data.

In my experience a review of KPI alignment within Procurement but also between Procurement and Operations is a good barometer to gauge whether a company's vision cascades cleanly through an organisation. A simple yardstick can be whether ESG goals referenced in the company vision apply only to internal operations or cascade all the way from procurement policies to processes and supplier contracts.

In my experience, if your plan is to communicate the vision and goals, you will fail at involving people. People need to be part of a dream, and feel responsible of the steps towards that common dream. As result it is critical that a common aspiration is set at a high level, but with room for people to participate in building an agreed image of why is achieving that dream important for us (team level) and me (individual level). And then the goals and key milestones are proposed by the very teams, creating a sense of ownership that drives motivation. Also, please do consider the Ikea bias, people over-evaluate anything they work hard... if anything comes to life too easy, we under appreciate it. Every actor need to be a protagonists.

For many organisations collaboration needs to extend into the supply chain. If the procurement approach with certain suppliers is 'transactional', this needs to be addressed first before true collaboration can take place.

Procurement has been impacted by many cultural changes, especially those stemming from ESG values and targets. In my experience, organisations that deployed dedicated procurement resources to embed these cultural changes into their organisations have been more successful in their implementations, than those that have divided this responsibility amongst team members and added it to the BAU workload. For some organisations that has meant short dedicated sprints whilst others have created dedicated positions or teams.

One critical consideration I invite you to consider regarding the model you use to manage this change: If you are experience the exponential pace of change in the Industry 5.0, then all the change management models of 1990s and 2000s are not right for you. These models are based on an episodic view of the world, where you move from a current state A to a desired state B, during a 2-5 year period where the world changes very little (so little you can define clearly what the state B looks like). Industry 5.0 forced you to consider change with new models (example ESCAPE from Gartner). To be direct, if you have a monopoly or work in a government function, Kotter and ADKAR are still a good options - and very good matured models.