What are the best ways to use data to identify skills and competencies for successful culture change?

Culture change is indeed a journey filled with key moments to engage stakeholders and employees along the way. Define your North Star first - what is your ideal outcome? Make it broad vs specific - a big part of the journey is winding your way towards what works for the organization. In addition to overall metrics and goals, break them into short, medium, and long-term. This will allow you to celebrate the wins and reflect on continued areas of opportunity.

I've found it effective to align buy-in in conjunction as you lay strategy, goals, and objectives. This provides the opportunity to socialize the cultural beliefs and values that can then be combined with the data to drive the desired culture. Socializing data is central to integrating and sustaining the expected outcomes.

Defining your culture change goals is the pivotal first step toward transforming an organization. Clearly outlining these goals provides a roadmap, guiding every decision and initiative. It's about envisioning the values, behaviors, and atmosphere you aspire to cultivate within your team or company. These goals become the foundation upon which we build a positive, inclusive, and open work environment. These will be the guiding stars in a journey toward a transformative and thriving organizational culture for creating a purposeful journey

Is culture change the goal or the vehicle? If it is to change the culture, define the factors and behaviours in a way that it can be recognised and celebrated by everyone. Of it is the vehicle, use it as a decision framework to exclude that which is not contributing to the goals to enable a lean and agile approach to achieving company goals, thus supporting clear focused action.

Culture change is a challenging journey, but with a clear vision, strong commitment, and strategic approach, it becomes attainable. To align your team and identify the necessary skills, data is key. Start by articulating a compelling vision, then use data to assess your current state, benchmark, and provide feedback. Tailor training, measure progress with KPIs, celebrate successes, and remain adaptable. This creative data-driven approach fosters commitment and alignment, turning culture change into a shared and achievable adventure.

It’s really dangerous to just focus on skills, you can’t train out a ‘bad’ or misaligned culture. Look at your strategic narrative, build a readiness mindset and give people the opportunity to try new behaviours by tweaking your system and actively encouraging and supporting experimentation. Once that is in place there is a chance your skills audit and development will add some value.

When assessing your culture for change, take a comprehensive approach. Beyond data, conduct cultural audits, combining quantitative and qualitative insights. Use surveys, interviews, and feedback for metrics, but also delve into narratives through focus groups. Examine performance reviews as puzzle pieces of your culture. Observe daily interactions for subtleties. Employ diverse data analysis techniques to uncover patterns. Understand skills, competencies, and the context influencing them. Identify not only strengths and weaknesses but also opportunities and threats. This comprehensive view is crucial for effective culture change efforts.

Understanding the technology systems and processes for data capture you have in place currently helps you define what you can measure and where you need to shore up information gaps. You should also assess the team’s level of data literacy from top to bottom. Defining metrics that your team doesn’t know how to calculate or understand the meaning of can leave the team frustrated versus excited for the journey. If your current state includes an opportunity to build data literacy do that!

Ideally, you should use already existing data to create a baseline for the current state. Some examples are: - Organizational Climate annual surveys - Annual Performance Reviews - Succession Planning Skill/Leadership analysis - External Customer Service surveys (i.e. Net Promoter Score) - SWOT Analysis from the commercial group or Senior Leaders The tricky part is often assigning a number to intangible indicators; Likert Scales, Word Counts, and sentiment analysis in the comments can help. The key benefit of using similar metrics in both the current state and the target (future/to-be) state is that the gap analysis and target state will be easier to quantify moving forward.

In order to assess your current state you need to be able to go granular. So many surveys and big data metrics miss the point that more often than not culture needs to be broken down into silos. For instance the culture of the IT team working remotely for a large manufacturing company is going to be very different than the culture of the night shift of machine operators. You therefore need a very grounded approach in understanding the culture of every subgroup of the company so that you can work on the different subgroups whose culture does not align or reflect the company's objectives.

Here’s the problem with external benchmarks. I like playing golf, my “target state” is to be a better golfer. Who do I choose to benchmark against? I’ll never be as good as the world No 1. How do I stay motivated to change when the gap between me and No1 is so big? Do I really need to be world No 1? The psychology of data. Set achievable incremental benchmarks against your current state. (Drop my score by 2 shots every 3 months) Set metrics that indicate a move in the right direction, even if the big change (a drop in score) doesn’t happen (5 pars per round). Define why the change is important at a personal level. (I want to enjoy my golf, not be a professional golfer). Move people, not needles.

I recommend using a radar map to plot your target state and match it against your current state. Your critical decision is what specific much-needed skills and competencies impact your culture change. This should also include learning from the best in the industry. Could you look at the gaps and then identify the steps to narrow them? You can't check all of them in one go. Start with the low-hanging fruits. Any win is a great confidence booster for the team. Then, map out the rest by looking into Why (Clear of the Vision), Who (Champions to drive the change), What (Resources required), How Much (Cost involved), Where (Select the Skills/Competencies), When (Milestones) and How (Flowchart required to Implement the change).

Use data to chart your culture change destination strategically. Benchmark against industry standards but innovate beyond. Analyze data for future insights, considering trends, challenges, and emerging opportunities. Segment skills as essential, desirable, and emerging. Update your vision regularly, fostering adaptability. Data transforms culture change into a proactive, future-oriented strategy.

Targets change. It's really difficult to set targets for a group of people and then implement plans to get there, unless you are looking for compliance. If you are looking for commitment, let the people you want commitment from be the authors of targets and strategies.

When a company has to identify where they want to be or the "target state" is not favorable to benchmark yourself against your competitors. I believe in identifying your own difficulties or an internal SWOT Analysis. Applying a SWOT analysis [Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats] to your organization's goals can help in better strategic planning and resource allocation. I can't compare myself to my neighbor. We do things differently, we feed differently, we think differently. You can only benchmark physical products, because even services behave different from one provider to the other.

Develop a prioritization matrix for the skills and people you need to develop, in what ways, and on what timeline. What skills are going to be most additive to your culture change initiatives right now? How can you meet learners where they are in their learning journey and truly create a culture of curiosity and innovation?

Many people will usually jump in and do the typical TNA analysis which is good thing but not what you would build your learning and development plan on only. After pandemic many companies discovered that there is big gap between the generations. Old generation do not want to change too much and are happy with their status quo , while the newer generation want quick changes & to feel instant gratification. For a new plan L&D experts need to design the following 1. Culture awareness sessions which discuss why we need to change. 2. Ask partipants what course they need. 3 offer one on one coaching sessions to advise them on the best possible option to cultural transform. 4. Sit with management and discuss with them the values of the company.

Data-driven personalization is vital in crafting a culture change learning plan. Prioritize impactful skills using data on demand and supply. Customize for individual needs and preferences based on data insights. Optimize methods and resources with data-driven insights. Continuously gather feedback and adapt, fostering a culture of perpetual growth.

In parallel to designing an L&D Plan, there are two other important things to consider: 1) Resistances: Are there any resistances to complete the L&D Plan? e.g., competing deadlines or goals that could avoid the plan completion at the estimated timeline. 2) Incentives: Are there any "rewards" if a person/group drives the new behavior in the L&D Plan? Planning for resistance and incentives is often included in Change Management or is part of the overall Project Management activities. Ensuring they are aligned with the overall culture change will increase the odds of driving the new behaviors.

Changing culture, and making any kind of change that involves people is like driving a car at night. you can only see as far as the headlights but, you can drive across the whole country that way. Top leadership or the enterprise can serve change best by making the conditions for others conducive to growing.

Evaluation is meaningful when the locus of control is in the people being evaluated. The implementation process should be viewed as a fluid process where more learning can be harvested and included in the next iteration of goals and strategies. Culture change and change in general is a natural process that is always occurring. To view change as something we can check off the list, makes it out of harmony with the natural way things work. To make change a part of the way we do things around here, and a clear measurable responsibility of leaders is more in harmony with the way nature work.

Implementing a dynamic learning plan means continual data-driven evaluation. Track learner progress, performance, and outcomes with both quantitative and qualitative data. Value stakeholder and employee feedback for real-world insights. Adapt the plan based on data, ensuring alignment with evolving needs. Showcase the plan's impact through quantifiable skill improvements and cultural shifts, fostering a culture of continuous learning and development.

Consider using a change management framework such as Prosci’s ADKAR Model. This provides a framework for decision making for your leadership team and specific prompts and ways to bring the broader team into the journey. Any change needs a clear Why and that must be communicated throughout the organization. Build a robust communications plan to drive transparency around the goals, metrics, and purpose. Be sure to highlight the areas where you’re on track and where you need to keep focusing to meet your goals.

Did you know that "Cultures are to Company what characters are to people"? I borrow this amazing quotation from Tony Hsieh, the former CEO of Zappos. The same way a character can make or break someone, a culture can make or lose a company. Yes lose. It will happen slowly. In fact so slowly that when you'll see it, it will likely be too late. Another thing we often forget... is that you cannot create a company culture. It is something that emerges. For this to happen, you need a drive from the top, and huge momentum from the bottom (assuming here a classical hierarchical model). When you let your culture emerge, you also enable changes from within, which does create an acceleration in the capability to integrate that change. Neat. Right?

Identify quick wins, celebrate success, use your data to inform and provide objective evidence of the first benefits of the change initiatives. Constantly seek qualitative and quantitative measures to enable you to track, report and communicate every positive outcome. A broad and deep data management strategy will assist you maintain momentum, attract others to your growing change coalition and assist you in neutralising those factions who will attempt to distract, delay or undermine the transformation.

Use the data as a secondary source to collective and representative regard. Why? Because every piece of data is tied to human thoughts and feelings. Survey responses are data points, but they come from human thoughts and feelings about the workplace or whatever topic the survey was querying. Demographics are data points, but they come from human thoughts and feelings that influenced hiring, promotion, etc. All to say, you cannot prioritize data while simultaneously acknowledging that it's tied, at the root, to human thoughts and feelings. We often try to digitize, overuse data, and overuse frameworks to explore, understand, and resolve culture which, by definition, is collective regard and social norms. People aren't data points.

In today's dynamic business landscape, understanding and evolving organizational culture is paramount. Utilizing data is key to identify essential skills and competencies for successful culture change. Methods include employee surveys gauging attitudes and values, analyzing performance data to pinpoint critical skills, reviewing customer feedback for customer-centric skills, and benchmarking against industry peers. Leveraging these insights, organizations can tailor training and initiatives, fostering a culture aligned with their goals and ensuring sustained success.