Overview

It is fair to say that, at Brand Experiences, we are fascinated by organisational culture. Partially because we know the huge impact a positive culture can have on the success of an organisation, but also because it is one of the most misunderstood areas of business. Your culture is organic and virtually impossible to control. In fact, trying to dictate your corporate culture will be detrimental to your business.

Then there are subcultures to consider. While it is sensible to have a common culture throughout the organisation when it comes to key elements like purpose, values and ethics; you might want to encourage different behaviours across different departments. For example, the norms and rituals in the Sales team could be very different to the Customer Service or Finance teams. The same could apply to different geographical regions.

Organisational culture is not just an internal matter as it also resonates outwards to all stakeholders, affecting every aspect of your operations from employee engagement to customer satisfaction. Investing in and nurturing a positive and strong organisational culture is vital for any business striving for long term success and resilience.

Our approach

At Brand Experiences, we believe that the best results are achieved when organisations take a continuous improvement approach to their culture. This approach has the added advantage of fostering a culture of innovation and change.

We like to think about culture as a flywheel for your business. A positive culture will accelerate your performance across all aspects of the organisation, whereas a negative culture will hold you back. And a toxic culture can be fatal.

We have developed a Culture Flywheel to assist organisations to implement improvements to their culture. It consists of 5 stages: 

Analyse

Understand the current state of organisational culture and where improvements can be made. Benchmark performance to establish a baseline.

Strategise

Identify where and how improvements will be made, obtain key stakeholder buy-in and budgetary approval.

Optimise

Implement the proposed improvements including pulling the right team together to deliver a successful outcome.

Socialise

Supporting the rollout of improvements with communications and training to ensure new processes are successfully adopted.

Realise

Quantify the improvements and publicise the results. Ensure that improvements are embedded and become Business As Usual (BAU).

The flywheel is then repeated for each round of improvements.

We can also facilitate a programme of workshops to introduce some of the key components of a business culture including:

• Purpose
• Values
• Psychological Safety
• Feedback
• Rituals
• Meetings
• Decision Making
• Norms & Rules
• Communication
• Working Practices

While we recommend a long-term continuous improvement approach, we also acknowledge the need for some quick wins to set the right tone for what is to follow.

By far our most powerful tool in this context is our employee motivation platform - mojo, which supports a culture change programme by putting your people at the heart of it:

• Understanding what motivates your employees is key to putting the right change and transformation teams together and will also allow the rollout programme to be tailored for different employee archetypes.
• Mojo improves employee wellbeing and resilience to reduce burnout and other factors that will undermine your culture change efforts.
• The more motivated your people are, the more likely they are to engage with innovation, change and transformation.
• Mojo supports diverse and inclusive workplaces by celebrating each employees individual intrinsic motivators and strengths.