How Long Does It Take to Change Company Culture?

When you’re proposing a new way of working, everyone wants to know two things:

• How long will it take to change?
• Do we really have to?

“It depends” doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, especially if you’re proposing a major shakeup. So this week on Future of Work, we investigated how change happens (or fails to) in teams.

Making the Best of Worst-Case Scenarios

Companies, just like people, typically won’t change until they have to. But crises and low-points can serve to galvanize the team and force everyone to deal with underlying issues that have been avoided. Taking definitive action will help speed up your timeline for change, as the following companies illustrate:

• 90 Days. When Jeffrey Katzenberg was brought in to turn around Disney’s Animation Studio in the 1980s, he noted, “You’ve got 90 days to change culture before it starts changing you.” While not everything was fixed immediately, the changes implemented in those first months laid the groundwork for the Disney Renaissance of the 90's.
• 1.5 Years. Steve Jobs was reappointed as Apple’s CEO in August 1997, when he quickly cancelled the Newton and announced an Apple-Microsoft deal. The iMac was released in August 1998 and returned the company to profitability for the first time in three years. A second generation of new color models followed in January 1999, and a week after, Apple announced that quarterly earnings had increased 3x over the prior year. That, plus the popularity of the iBook, helped send Apple’s stock price to $99.
• 2 Years. Domino’s spent two years developing new sandwich products and improving their staple recipes, using consumers and franchisees as test subjects throughout the process. Once they were confident in their new product, they launched the “Pizza Turnaround” campaign, and needed just one quarter to show a 14% increase in sales.
• 3 Years. In September 2012, Hubert Joly, Best Buy’s current CEO, came to the rescue by creating a framework for managing a successful corporate turnaround. His transformational leadership helped Best Buy return 154% in three years. We explain his rules for leading organizational change in our new post.

Think Big

Unfortunately, most companies don’t realize they’re facing a crisis until it’s too late: Xerox ignored the personal computing movement. Kodak missed the digitization of film. Blockbuster was defeated by streaming.

Companies which stand the test of time must constantly experiment with new ways to capture, package, and distribute value to their customers. We love the Business Model Framework developed by Tom Hulme and Colin Raney — yep, even more than the popular Business Model Framework — and have put together a step-by-step guide on how to hack your existing business model.

Just as important as evolving your model, though, is convincing others that it’s the right thing to do. As you’re developing your proposal, be prepared to answer the following questions:

1. Why should we do it? Is there a clear path to growth and category dominance?
2. What do we need to deliver? What value are we promising to customers, and how do they expect to receive it?
3. How will this change our organization? Do we have the necessary capabilities and organizational structure to execute this idea?
4. What are the risks? What happens if we fail? What unintended consequences could happen if we succeed?
5. How can we prototype or pilot this? How do we learn as much as we can with investing as little as possible? What assumptions are most critical to test immediately, and how do we design that test?

Start Small

If your organization isn’t ready to consider massive changes, we suggest starting with meetings. They’ve become the de facto way for how teams do work today, so making a change here has a ripple effect. We have plenty of tools to help you design meetings, but here are a few tips that will keep them running on time:

1. Include travel time. Make standard meeting times 20 or 50 minutes to allow for the “passing period.”
2. Set simple policies. For regular meetings, collectively write up attendance and late policies which might look something like, “notify the team 24 hrs in advance if you can’t make it” or, “if you come in late, sit down quietly and listen until you have caught yourself up rather than making everyone recap the meeting.”
3. Have a one-on-one with latecomers. For a chronically late person, sit down with them and explain that showing up late is a sign of disrespect for people and their time. Ask what you can do to help them meet their commitments or help them not over commit.
4. Designate a time keeper. Assign one person per meeting to announce when there are 10 and 5 minutes remaining. This helps meetings start on time by making sure others aren’t running over (see #1).

Whether it’s a daily habit or a complete corporate turnaround, making changes — and getting them to stick — is difficult. But keeping people motivated with small wins will move you towards the bigger picture.

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