Culture measurement and change

Culture is one of the greatest drivers for us as human beings. Therefore, understanding your organisation’s culture maturity level is essential to ensure that any intervention, whether that is a behavioural programme, business improvement programme or cultural change programme will achieve the lasting success that you are looking for.

One of the more popular definitions of culture is ‘It’s the way we do things around here’ but in reality this is not quite accurate. Effectively, culture is what sits behind the reasons and drivers for the way we do things around here. The actions, attitudes and behaviours that are visible are essentially outputs of your culture. By attempting to change those outputs, culture itself will remain the same and over a relatively short period of time, people will simply return to the previous ways because that what culture does; it eats strategy and tactics for breakfast!

Obviously, the answer is to make real, hard changes to your culture in a way that will drive the desirable outcomes just as hard as it currently drives the undesirable ones. This will undoubtedly involve change to the core of business and before embarking on such a journey, it’s essential that there is a genuine appetite within those who are in a position to sanction those changes.

Measuring your culture provides you with:

1. A baseline measure to measure improvements against in future
2. A true understanding of the issues that the culture faces
3. A guide to the very real, practical steps that you can take in order to continue to improve your culture.

When it comes to measuring culture, one size does not fit all, therefore at Anker & Marsh we can provide a number of cultural measurement tools, and we’d be happy to take you through the options that suit you.

We also provide excellent training on culture creation at both board and management levels.