Organisation Culture - The secret sauce

“Culture is behavior at scale. Companies that create a winning culture are five times more likely to be top performers. Being able to attract, develop & retain talent - that’s going to be the single most important factor in whether we’re going to succeed as corporations in the years to come.”

Given the global context, many organisations across industry sectors have been in deep self-introspection mode to review what they stand for and what will they stand for going forward.

As a result of this self-introspection, it is becoming increasingly clear that resting on past laurels / reputation or relying on proprietary systems and processes will no longer be enough to drive the future or create a sustainable business / social impact.

In short, the magnitude of disruption caused over the last few years is such that whatever they have been doing / planning will now not be enough to get where they wish to be in the future. It is time to rethink and reinvent.

In an attempt to give a sharper focus and meaning to their business, many of these organisations ended up spending serious time, effort and energy to formalize / redefine their Purpose, Vision, Values and desirable culture / behaviours required to implement this future shift.

Will this be enough? Too often companies stop here – mistakenly believing that simply formalising and communicating the new way forward will be enough to redefine Culture and reinvent the business. Whereas in reality, much more work is required before any organisation will see a true change in the way its people work.

Culture is the secret sauce that drives organisational performance and growth. Successful organisations of the future will be focused on creating an efficient and high-performing culture through driving / influencing the way employees and associates own the business.

In order to enable organisations towards ‘Redefining Culture’, Xstrops established the ‘Culture Pods’ Approach to enable Organisations in cultivating & demonstrating success, as follows –

• Facilitate identification of the cultural attributes and behaviours that the company needs to cultivate,
• Support identification of specific business issues that can be solved only through these new behaviours,
• Prioritize a few of these problems and entrust each to a cross-functional team. These teams break the tasks into modules and work on them in short cycles known as sprints,
• Leadership team ensures these teams work in a safe ‘bubble’, free from other business distractions. This helps leaders understand what will need to change for the new behaviour to spread throughout the company,
• Celebrate and communicate these teams’ successes, generating the energy needed to push the cultural change throughout the organisation,
• Xstrops Consulting teams deputed are specially trained to facilitate and monitor the entire process end-to-end while also mentoring respective teams on a regular basis to drive success.

Key Benefits:

• Success and credibility for Leaders by communicating, celebrating and demonstrating benefits of the new behaviour / culture through the Xstrops Culture Pods Approach,
• Establishment of a simple and non-threatening approach to managing change that takes people along – handholding people into the future,
• Swift and easy scale-up into a Large-Scale Cultural Transformation across the organisation, enabling the business for the future.

The success of the Xstrops Culture Pods Approach has been tremendous and has allowed many organisations to introduce swift and relatively painless cultural change, enabling the organisation to unlock and align to the future path envisioned.