Five Ways to Jump Start a Culture Shift
Yes, there really are simple, fun and relatively fast ways to jump start a shift in your culture. Not only are these effective, they are are also great ways to get as many employees involved in your culture as possible! (The full transcript is available below!)
Here are five great tips to get everybody in your organization involved in taking your culture to the next level of success, to get everybody excited about ramping up your culture.
#1. Issue a three-in-three challenge. Depending on the size of your organization, you could do this at an individual level, team level, or entire department level. Here’s all you do. Challenge everyone to come up with three ideas, three actionable ideas, three things they actually implement over the course of three months that will have a positive, substantial impact on your culture, and award a prize at the end of the three months for whoever implements the best, most rocking idea.
#2. Do a values blitz. An office in Copenhagen, Denmark that I visited, AFA JCDecaux, they totally transformed their culture within the span of six months by doing this simple exercise. They had created four brand new values with input from all their employees, always a good idea, and then to make sure those values came to life, to make sure that people understood what those values really meant, they did what I would call values blitz. One week, one value at a time, they challenged everybody to live that value out loud in an outrageously loud way for just one week. Then week two, we’ll go down to value two, week three, value three, week four, value four. Go back to the top, cycle through.
And the challenge was this, just live it in outrageously loud ways. So the needle is maybe going to go way over here. Maybe we’re not going to be able to sustain this in the long term, but at least let’s show what’s possible. Maybe we’ll come back to here for the long term, but let’s show what’s actually possible. Let’s bring these suckers to life. Well, after six months, everybody in that company agreed with the statement,” I work for a brand new company.” So try doing a values blitz in your organization.
#3. Create monthly culture themes. Create monthly culture themes related to some aspect of your culture. Maybe it’s one of your values. Maybe it’s just something you want everyone to work on. Maybe it’s some aspect of communication or customer service. But make it culture-related, a theme that changes every month that everyone can rally around and focus on for one month at a time. So it could be what could we do this month to up our level of appreciation with each other? How can we show more appreciation and recognize each other in more powerfully, effective ways? The next month it might be, what can we do to be more environmentally friendly? That’s one of our core values. What can we do for this month to really focus on that particular value and up our game? Then the next month, it might be what can we do to connect with our community better? What can we do to build relationships within our local community? The sky is the limit. Monthly themes can have a huge impact on shifting your culture.
#4. Create a ritual or tradition that will help strengthen your culture. Every inspiring organization that I’ve researched around the world is a huge fan of rituals and traditions because they create that sense of shared history, shared experience that builds a strong culture, that defines a strong culture. They give everyone something to look forward to and something to reminisce about. HRdownloads, a software company in Canada listed as one of the best places to work for mid-sized companies, they have a fabulous Friday tradition that has strengthened their culture. Where everybody gets together, they do one team-building event. They share milestones, and they share positive results and celebrate positive results from that past week.
#5. Use the wheel of change to focus on continually improving your culture. Get everyone together and decide every 90 days, do this, what is one thing that we need to keep doing? We have to remember the importance of this and make sure we’re consistent. So what is one thing everyone needs to keep doing as it pertains to your culture? What is one thing you need to start doing as it pertains to your culture? What is one thing you need to stop doing, and what is one thing everyone just needs to learn to live with? It’s an incredibly effective framework for continuously improving your culture.
What about you? What has worked in your organization to get everybody involved in ramping up your workplace culture? Please leave a comment in the comment section!
Michael Kerr, February, 2021. Michael Kerr is a Hall of Fame speaker specializing in workplace culture. His latest book is The Jerk-Free Workplace.
