Implementing Culture Change

by Judy Ryan

As a business leader, you must anticipate what’s coming next, know how to respond, and be able to imagine and create solutions often never seen or considered before, pretty much on the fly. Everything happens fast and with great complexity, which means your people must be able to think and behave in powerful, intelligent, and innovative ways too. They need to be collaborative, confident, and courageous in order to co-create what’s next.

You hear about the importance of human capital, performance management, employee engagement, and workplace culture in presentations, articles, books, podcasts, and radio interviews. Most are describing the now-recognizable need for emotional intelligence skills to accomplish current and future initiatives. Human systems encapsulate the guiding principles we draw upon to inform us in how to think, speak, feel, and act in accordance with our evolutionary process. And like our technologies, they need to be continuously growing and changing. Human systems once considered ‘nice to have’ are now ‘need to have’. The health of your workplace culture is documented as a leading predictor of your success and proven to bring bottom-line improvements.

People often ask me, “How do I implement a workplace culture transformation?” This article is my answer. You need a framework. A framework is a set of components that manage complexity and make intricate things work. One example of a framework is technology. Your people are expected to have a cell phone and computer as minimum requirements. This is also required in schools today. The same is true for your human systems.

EVERY person who works for you needs to be included in a healthy, sustainable workplace culture process. A framework delivers this through a combination of necessary components, such as:

Assessment. We use multiple assessments just like doctors have multiple physical assessments for our bodies. We need checkups for our human systems to measure the alignment of each person with your purpose, values and visions, goals, procedures, and roles. You and they need to know the trust and engagement levels, and each person’s unique temperaments. This is a way to improve and then measure progress, including ROI.

Training. We use flipped training. This is when people repeatedly receive content in a multitude of formats. They not only hear it, see it, interact with it and lead it, they give and receive it in reciprocal mentoring sessions and help integrate it into new everyday operational practices like hiring, interviewing, and onboarding other employees, no matter title or experience. That’s a whole world different than old-school, one-off, top-down training. In flipped training, everyone uses auditory, kinesthetic, and visual ways of engaging with information and uses a digital platform so that what’s learned and used is fully distributive, scalable, and consistent.

Mentoring. The most important component in a workplace culture that goes beyond training, is monthly mentoring. In mentoring, every person is asked to be self and socially aware, then self and socially managing what is theirs to manage, through Socratic questions and encouraging support. This helps support your business growth. The contagiously happy and fulfilled teamwork that results is an inadvertent side benefit for all.

Systems Integration. Culture change should be a gig project so that your entire workforce will have picked up responsibility together and you are a company that manages your people development strategies. Then you stand out way ahead of many others. Let me know if we can help you implement your culture change process for your greatest advantage.

Judy Ryan (judy@LifeworkSystems.com), human systems specialist, is owner of LifeWork Systems. Join her in her mission to create a world in which all people love their lives. She can also be reached at 314-239-4727.
People hire LifeWork Systems because we help businesses become agile and manage their priority system: their human system. I hope this article helps you make sense of what’s most crucial to your evolving organization!