Our Process
Do you have a strategy for managing company culture?
Every company has regular ways of doing things. This doesn’t just include a habitual way of doing routine tasks but also a certain way of thinking, a certain way of making decisions, a certain way of seeing the world and a certain way of viewing and treating customers and employees.
This is culture, and most companies just allow it to develop organically. They do little to manage it. Rather than the company controlling its culture, the culture ends up controlling the company – and determining the results it achieves.
If you want to be in full control of the results that your company achieves, you have to manage the culture – because culture drives how people do their jobs, and how people do their jobs drives results.
Our process and our techniques give you a framework for measuring and understanding your culture and a framework for managing and changing it. You don’t need to make huge, frightening, irreversible changes to influence the way that people think and the way that they do their jobs. Small changes can often have a big impact, and our techniques are based around making small, incremental, reversible changes with a powerful effect.
We invite you to use our ideas, try out our techniques for yourself and enjoy the improved atmosphere and results you will see in your company. You can start today by following this link.
Is your culture strategy aligned with your corporate strategy?
You won’t achieve your best results if your people are just doing their own thing in their own way – not really working in a coordinated way and not acting in a way that is fully aligned with your corporate strategy and priorities. If you are to achieve your strategic objectives, you will need your people to think and act in certain ways that support those objectives. But how do you do that? It’s hard to control how people do their work. The key to that is culture. If the culture calls for people to perform routine tasks in a particular way, or to have certain priorities, or to have certain attitudes (such as putting the team first) then that is what people will do. Actively managing your culture is key, and if your strategy for managing your culture is aligned with your corporate strategy then you will turbocharge the results that you get. Aligning culture strategy and corporate strategy is at the heart of our process.
Let’s illustrate that with an example. Imagine what would happen if you took the staff from a successful high end restaurant and transplanted them into a fast food outlet. Behaviours that drove the success of the high end restaurant would ruin the fast food place. Everything the staff do would be wrong – wrong priorities, wrong way to organise the kitchen, wrong approach to marketing and customer service, etc. The culture of the organisation would be completely mismatched with what they were trying to achieve – culture and corporate strategy are completely mismatched (but would be perfectly aligned if they went back to their high end restaurant).
It is much easier to achieve your company’s goals if your decision making, your organisational structure and all other elements of the way the company operates are aligned with your goal and your strategy. It makes it even easier if that alignment happens effortlessly, because it is just part of the company’s DNA to do things in that way. That is the power of culture.
Building the company’s culture around goals and strategy also makes the company more “mission focused” and better at problem solving. When things get busy, as they inevitably will, the organisation does not fall apart because everyone knows what is important and what they need to focus on. Everyone works to the same priorities (the company’s real strategic priorities, not what is written on some motivational poster on the wall), which makes for a far more efficient machine in those “drop everything” moments.
Employee and Customer Experience
When the company has a strong culture that is aligned with its goals, the company’s behaviour becomes much more authentic – when you say something you mean it and your actions match your words. No more empty slogans, hollow promises or meaningless policies.
This authenticity is very attractive to customers. You say what you mean with confidence and conviction. Whether your focus is on customer service or on value for money or on the quality of your product, they will see that you are genuinely dedicated to delivering that.
The same is true for employees. These days people are increasingly looking to find meaning in their work and an employer who is truly authentic goes a long way towards providing that. That in turn translates into greater employee engagement, greater efficiency and higher retention rates.
Find Out More
If you would like to read about how we help to evaluate and manage a company’s culture, please look at this page. To learn about us and our story, look here. To read some of the articles and posts that we have written, click here.
We hope you enjoy looking at our site and learning about Aletheian Advisors and what we do.