Building a Winning Team: 8 Culture Changing Tips

8 Company Culture Change Tips

 From Awkwardness to Well Oiled: Working through Company Culture Change

 The difference between a productive and growth oriented culture and one that struggles to reach consensus is generally likened to a fine dining restaurant who accepts less than exacting presentation and overall beauty in its cuisine. Ultimately, it comes down to whether your company is working to build and maintain an 'A' team or it continues to accept less than excellent work or fails to mentor its staff into their total capacity.

Whether or not an organization seems to have all its ‘ducks in a row’, or obvious dysfunction within an organization is clearly seen, most companies benefit greatly by performing a ‘Cultural Evaluation’.

 Many companies do not begin the Business Developmental Process or planning with the establishment of ‘Company Culture’, of which those same companies find themselves with company cultures that shape themselves….not necessarily establishing positive internal interrelational attributes.

 Conducting a fairly simple process of evaluating company culture & simultaneously establishing policies to encourage relational development & strong interpersonal culture can take a clumsy organization & turn it into a well oiled machine.

1) Culture evaluation – identifying your organizations strengths and weaknesses is the first step in repairing the weaknesses & exploiting the strengths of your staff & its systems. Every organization has positive and negative attributes & it is vital that this first step is approached with sensitivity. You might identify an outside professional that currently works with your company & is somewhat familiar with staff to help ‘guide’ the culture evaluation.  If not, hiring out this process altogether is suggested to insure good counsel & accountability. 

Wine character evaluation is very similar to company culture evaluation.

2) Identifying destructive behavioral attributes that exist or have ‘snuck in’ – once identified, create employee interactions to soften & work through each of the behavioral issues. Shine a light on them without pointing directed fingers. Conduct Team Development drills & other interactive exercises to help engage the employees with each other under the common policy structure of the company. You may identify difficulties within your staff of which an attitude or behavior may be difficult to reverse, but don’t throw in the towel too early in the process but evaluate the hearts of each of your staff as you begin with a company commitment to make improvements. NOTE: If there is a specific staff member who struggles in this area, a one on one meeting should be done in private according to your companies disciplinary policy.

3) Establishing ‘Buy-In’ – Leadership of an organization must identify common team values & then insure that the company values are communicated well to staff. Is there something more to your organization than just the bottom line? Finding core-values that resonate with staff is helpful in gaining ‘buy-in’ by staff. It does not mean that the company should evolve around the values that the staff finds important, per se, after all, it is a company that has employees to work for its values & vision. Saying this, it should be obvious that a robust hiring process should strive to hire personality & traits suited to the philosophies of the organization.

"How do you expect me to soar like an eagle if I'm surrounded by turkeys?"

4) Establish ‘mini off-site’ brainstorming exercises to stimulate creativity – little excursions, even sending 2-3 staff members to a 2 hour Starbuck’s session can drive staff interaction & openness to ideas between staff. Making this a regular part of the company structure drives a culture of openness, creativity & trust. Keep your staff accountable & ask for minutes or a briefing of what was discussed or accomplished but be careful not to be terribly critical, especially in the beginning of this process.

5) Establishing the Core Philosophy – Create the message of the company through a brand message that reads & sounds like a short film. A story that ‘resolves’ or concludes with the implementation of services or products that your company delivers is a message that each staff will own as their own story. If you have rooted out negative behavior, established buy-in, created trust & openness to ideas & process, you may find that the story evolves & even tells itself through the eyes of your employees.

6) Establishing ‘Think Tank’ policies – All people want to contribute to the success of their organization in a way that when they look at a product they can say, ‘This little corner of it right here, that’s the part I did.’ It’s like scratching your initials in the wet pavement that says ‘I was here and am proud of it’. Literally create a policy that states the company commitment to creating improvements or refinements in current systems & then back up the policy with implementation. Today, with international standards of systems & conduct, it is important to integrate this and all other ideas into the structure of your ISO or other standard if established.

When companies make culture change a priority, it builds 'bridges of certainty'.

7) Encourage Lead Staff to Set Clear departmental goals for culture consistency – Weaving the leadership into the culture change is a critical component in tying all the culture change objectives to the business & strategic goals of the organization. Without this, many employees, especially your ‘creatives’ (often leadership in marketing organizations), will feel like they’re ‘just another spoke in the company wheel carrying out its duty’. Once all the components above have been established as company commitment, it is very important to ask your leadership to identify areas of culture improvement within their own departments & to write an ‘initiative’ to strengthen the culture within their own supervision responsibilities.

8) Individual Developmental Projects – to drive a last bit of energy into your organization’s culture-change initiative, ask your leadership & creative staff to submit 3 independent projects that they believe would create greater value &/or efficiencies into the organization. Establish budgetary guidelines as well as ‘rules of engagement’ before you suggest this. Rules of engagement could be something like establishing parameters of category work or topic matter or a rough ‘list’ of weak areas that need to be shored up. Help your leadership to refine the projects to make a solid contribution to the company’s current systems, procedures and/or protocols & then calendar the project with goals & incremental deadlines. Keep it accountable. 

Your company, large or small, may have existing parameters of policy that need to be considered prior to engaging in the exercise of making a culture change. The more issues your company has with negative company morale or discontent, the longer the process may take to work through as a ‘culture transformation’. You might want to be very open to the process taking upwards of 6-9 months or more depending on how deep the issues or how in-depth developmental projects may be.

About the author:  After a three-decade career in winemaking, Nicholas Karavidas is now developing his wine portfolio as the Principal and Winemaker of ‘RedHaus & élever Vineyards and Winery’. Nicholas is a passionate fine art landscape photographer and also teaches online and regional workshops for Direct to Consumer strategies and Family Business Legacy as a liaison to the USC Marshall School Family Business Center. He can be reached at (209) 625-6339 or mail at [email protected]