How Long Can it Take to Change Corporate Culture?

For every business, brand identity is everything. It determines how they are perceived in the market place, the accolades they collect right through to the customers they attract and retain.

When you consider ‘Corporate Culture’, what comes to mind? For me it was the 'spiral employee slide' at Google. Corporate culture identity is now as influential and strategically important to employee engagement, employee experience, staff retention and attracting talent as brand identity is to revenue and profitability.

On frequent trips to the US, I would only ever fly with one particular airline. Changes from that were always disappointing. Ironically, I was equally as loyal to a different airline for all flights to the UAE. Their brand was synonymous with class, comfort and superior customer service. My customer experience was exceptional.

Change is a very expensive exercise and whilst it can take time for firms to change their branding, it also takes time for businesses to change their 'Culture' and begin to see the effects of that change rolled out to and adopted by its employees and customers.

I once interviewed for a job where they had the old large, chewing gum white, monitors on everyone's desk when most other offices elsewhere were more current with flat screen Dell monitors. I walked out of the interview knowing they did not have a culture that I could be successful in.

There are fundamental checks and balances that must occur prior, in order to initiate a change programme [Executive buy in, recruitment at director level, etc] but below, I map out a hypothetical timeline that can be used as a guide to any programme designed to enable and support corporate cultural change once the change programme is green lit.

A somewhat aggressive timeline but an 18 month breakdown could read as follows:

• Day 1, Hire new Chief People Officer (A first step, moving from a HR run business to a People orientated business),
• 3 months to build internal partnerships and understand the existing culture. Conversation, strategy meetings, Employee Satisfaction Surveys, hire team/resource, etc,
• 3 months to capture survey results and associate manually captured information to the ESS reports.
• 3 months to train, coach and mentor internal leaders as to the ways of the new culture. 
• 3 months to identify non-compliant staff at all levels and where they don't conform, identifying opportunities for severance then recruit staff who fit the new company culture requirements.
• 6 months implementation, applying new principles and gaining adoption of staff. Staff buy in is critical. 

Although extremely aggressive, one is likely to conclude 18-24 months is the time required to change corporate culture. It is also important to note that changing corporate cultural is never complete. Companies feel the ripple effect to the changes of social norms. They need to constantly be able to welcome change and adapt. Firms who refuse to acknowledge these changes in society and their impact on their business will struggle to attract new hires and more importantly, they will struggle to retain talent; losing their best assets to their competition.

No matter how great the talent or efforts, some things just take time ~ Warren Buffet

Human Capital Consultancy: Through 1:1 anonymous, consultative, employee interviews, we first perform a deeper dive into concerns employee are not willing to share with their employer due to a fear of reprisal. Then in partnership with your business we work to identify solutions. This enables improved employee engagement and empowers corporate cultural change. We achieve success with our AIP model because Human Capital Consultancy is one step removed. www.humancapcon.co.uk