Enabling Modern Business Culture

At the Pacesetter stage, enabling modern business culture focuses on reinforcing or changing how the company actually works. You move from orchestrating interventions, i.e. removing roadblocks, designing rituals, running workshops, to making culture systematic and pervasive.

What You Do

1. Address people management criteria.
   • Is the company’s aspirational culture truly driving criteria for hiring, promotions, compensation and separations? This may sound easy, but it will test leadership’s commitment to the desired culture.
   • Examples:
     • Are we going to deny a significant promotion or compensation increase to someone who consistently delivers results, but who does not exemplify our values and behaviors?
     • Does it really matter how a person gets results?
     • Are we going to pass on a job applicant who has gold-plated credentials but who does not seem like a strong “cultural fit”?
2. Address policies and practices.
   • There are countless policy decisions that may support or impede your desired culture. Do your policies aid your organization’s commitment to diversity and inclusion? Do any of your practices impede your organization’s commitment to collaboration and innovation?
   • Examples:
     • Agile requires shoulder-to-shoulder teamwork; does this run counter to our “flex” and “work-from-home” practices?
     • We say we revere the customer. Are our policies and practices regarding pricing, returns and exchanges, last-moment cancellations, and requested modifications and changes consistent with our stated values?
3. Address the work environment.
   • Collaborate with HR, CIO, real estate and other C-Suite colleagues to design the work environment that the desired culture requires, including tools, workspaces and team configurations.
   • Work with IT/CIO to ensure that employees have the right tools and applications to work in the prescribed way.
   • Examples:
     • Teaming requires collaboration tools.
     • Customer-centricity requires customer data, analytics and insights.
     • Innovation may require Agile training, tools and workspaces.
   • Continuously sample the workforce, seeking feedback supported by automation systems (see Brand Progression/Pathfinder) and with Agile teams quickly responding to what the data says.
4. Infuse automation and intelligence into the culture system. 
   • Continuously solicit feedback; monitor internal and external social conversations; identify problems through predictive analytics; and route issues to the appropriate parts of the organization for action.
5. Use the company’s culture to play offense.
   • Equip, encourage and enable the workforce to become your organization’s most visible and effective advocates.
   • Examples:
     • Create communication systems that reveal appropriate inner workings, i.e. your strongest culture traits, to key stakeholders, including those you wish to hire. This can be as simple as making areas of the company’s social platforms accessible outside the company. Just doing this conveys a level of confidence and trust that can be powerful arguments for the enterprise.
     • Use avenues you have created for employee participation to generate business solutions. Alibaba’s Aliway is an example of communication used to create a problem-solving platform.
     • Use the Page Model – from belief to action to confidence to advocacy – as a journey map to teach employees to become not just examples of – but also effective advocates for – the company’s brand and culture.