Experimenting By The Quarter
Jonathan Corteen
Two-time Best Selling Author | Culture Coach | Speaker | I teach business leaders how to double their recruiting, triple their retention and become the only game in town.
Welcome back, it’s great to see you back here again with me for another Culture Junky LinkedIn exclusive article as we close out this week. We’re halfway through January now, and if you’re anything like me you’re still trying to figure out where the holidays went.?
I like to use the beginning of each quarter to implement the new strategies for the quarter ahead. It’s a great transitionary period where you can run a sort of controlled experiment over a period of time before measuring your results again.?
If you implemented some new strategies to kick off the year, and you’re measuring the efficacy of all those great new culture experiences that you’re delivering to your team members, great you are on the right track!
If this year, and specifically this quarter, started and you haven’t implemented any new culture experiences for your team members I want to assist you with that process today in this article.?
Chances are over the course of the last quarter, or maybe the last year, you’ve had some great ideas about your culture and how you can improve it. At the start of the new quarter, I like to pick out a couple of those ideas to implement in the new quarter, but only a select few.?
You see if we throw 20 new ideas into the mix and implement all of these new culture experiences for folks on a day to day basis, it becomes very challenging to see which ideas are having positive and negative effects on the culture. There’s so much going on that being able to differentiate between the impact of each new system we’ve put in place becomes incredibly difficult.?
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You have to start small, get granular. Pick three ideas tops to focus on in this quarter ahead. Examine where your culture is now, before implementing the new ideas, so you have a baseline reading of where your culture is at right now. Give each new strategy time to take hold and then, once you’ve begun implementing the new great ideas you have, measure the change in those baseline numbers month to month so you can see where the difference is being made.?
Sometimes you have a great idea, and then after implementing you see that it isn’t having the positive impact you originally hoped. That doesn’t mean the idea was necessarily bad, maybe it just needs to be adjusted to deliver that positive experience in a more intentional way so that it reaches everyone on your team. Other times maybe an idea you thought would be great, wasn’t such a home run after all and needs to be cut after the quarter-long ‘trial run’.?
In either case it’s okay! This is why we set these experiments up to run over the course of the quarter, so we can see over a period of time how they do as we tweak them before ultimately deciding whether we want to implement them permanently.?
Because that’s the beauty of this whole thing, each quarter is used to test out new ideas, to see if they fit and will bring us closer to our ultimate goal of a best in class culture or not.?
Keep trying, keep measuring baselines and experimenting on a quarter by quarter basis and see what works for your culture and what doesn’t.?
Give that some thought, and have a great weekend.
Corteen