Our Process - the Benefits
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, commitment and results you will see in your company. You can start today by clicking on “How We Do It” in the menu above or by following this link.
Why you should align your culture strategy with your corporate strategy
You won’t achieve your best results if your people are just left to do their own thing in their own way. They won’t be working in a coordinated way and are unlikely to be acting in a way that is fully aligned with your corporate strategy and priorities. If you are to achieve those strategic objectives you will need people to think and act in 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 critical. 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 Aletheian’s process.
Let’s illustrate that with an example. Picture the staff of a successful high-end restaurant. They do things in a very particular, very exacting way – and everything they do is designed to give guests a superb dining experience. Their culture and their way of working is fully aligned with the objectives of the restaurant and they achieve great results. But now imagine that you transplant those same people and put them in charge of a fast food outlet. If they maintain all the behaviours and processes that drove the success of the high-end restaurant, they would be disastrously wrong in the fast food place – wrong focus on quality rather than speed, wrong way to organise the kitchen, wrong approach to customer service, wrong priorities, etc. The culture of the organisation (a culture that was perfectly aligned with the objectives of the high-end restaurant) would be completely mismatched with what they were trying to achieve. Culture and corporate strategy need to be aligned to achieve your strategic objectives, and the culture that is perfect for one company can be completely wrong for another.
It is so 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 goals 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 and that is what Aletheian aims to achieve for you.
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. In those “everyone drop everything because we have to get this done” moments, everyone knows what their role is and just gets on with it. Everyone works to the same priorities. All of this makes for a far more efficient machine in those crisis moments, and it means that when the crisis is over the company can just quietly return to normal rather than feeling traumatised.
Creating, Changing and Maintaining Culture
Creating or changing a culture is not a “once and done” exercise. A company’s culture needs constant attention and maintenance.
You have to ensure that good, helpful habits are maintained and reinforced. You have to stop any unhelpful practices or attitudes from gaining a foothold and becoming an established corporate habit. You have to induct new employees into the culture and constantly strengthen the culture among existing employees. You have to ensure that the culture adapts appropriately to new challenges, new technology and new circumstances.
A culture is never static. It constantly evolves in response to new situations, new events, new people, new stories, new ways of working and many other internal and external factors. Think how quickly school culture can change, with new jokes, new words, new fashions, new favourite bands and new ways of acting replacing the old – and then being replaced themselves within weeks. Corporate culture can change almost as quickly, and it therefore takes constant effort to keep it aligned with the company’s aims. Senior managers must also make sure that their own words and actions reinforce rather than undermining the desired culture. If you do not actively manage the evolution of your corporate culture it will develop in a random way that is likely to be counter-productive.
You therefore need an ongoing strategy for managing the culture, guiding it in the right direction, reinforcing positive elements and removing unhelpful aspects of it. It does not take big, dramatic gestures to influence the culture. Small changes can have a big impact, particularly if repeated consistently. If you want to jump ahead to see some of our techniques for managing and changing culture, we explore that in greater detail here.
How our process benefits your 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.
Our Approach
Many people adopt a “top down” approach to establishing and managing culture. They advise senior management to tell people how to behave, or they introduce lists of values that the company is supposed to follow.
Our approach is different. We believe that the essence of culture is found in the small things – such as the day-to-day interactions between colleagues, the things that get approval (or disapproval) and the attitudes that people have to their work, to colleagues and to the company.
We believe that those are the things that you have to change if you want to change the culture. We therefore adopt a “bottom up” approach that seeks to influence the mindset and the behaviours that people bring to their daily tasks and interactions. We know from our training in counselling and clinical hypnotherapy that a small change in perspective can have a big impact on how people think about and do their jobs – and that it often only takes a small insight to bring about a major change in perspective.
So our process is built around making small changes that have a big effect. Small changes that are as simple as circulating the P/L to everyone if you want people to focus more on profitability, or changing seating plans, or changing the mix of things you talk about in your weekly email to staff. You might not think that people would respond to such minor things, but they do. It works because as primates we are hard-wired to copy what other people do, particularly high status individuals. Failing to fit in with the group could mean exile and death for our ancestors, so we developed the ability to observe what others do very carefully and to copy what they do. We often do this without being aware of it.
The advantage of using small changes is that they are easy to implement, they aren’t scary and they can easily be reversed if they don’t work. Many are things that people may not even notice consciously, but they will respond to. So why not try some small changes today?
Find Out More
If you want to read about the steps in our process in order then click on “How We Do It” in the menu above. However, if you want to jump to a particular section then please follow one of the links below.
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.