Organization Development Debrief— Culture Shift
Organization Development Case Study: Looking back to look forward
What can we learn from past projects and apply to future projects? Hopefully most professionals executing projects are doing debriefs. After Action Reviews are very helpful regardless if you are an HR pro, project manager or organization designer. I thought it might be helpful to look at a past project, dissect it a bit and share a couple of lessons learned. You may have already learned these lessons, or have some of your own to share.
We had an org culture change initiative to actively engage all employees to use data-based decisions, increase open reciprocal communication, and to take more risks. Steps taken included:
1st We conducted a base-line study interviewing leadership to obtain their perspective of the current company culture, and how they envisioned a future state.
2nd We executed a quantitative survey of all employees to get a picture of how they saw the current company culture. The response rate was very good (> 70%) and included qualitative information in addition to the quantitative. I was directly responsible for executing the survey, pulling together the results, and reporting out the results of the survey.
3rd We had several retreats to help employees understand new expectations and to obtain ownership on all levels of the organization of the changes.
4th We also had a designated point person who was teaching the new communication style expectations which centered on paraphrasing, reflecting and repeating back. However, we were also encouraging employees in confirming if an expectation was not realistic regardless if it was with a supervisor or another employee in a different department. The goal was to have clearer job expectations and more psychological safety at all levels of the organization.
We integrated expectations into organizational culture
The CEO (and directors) role modeled behaviors in highly visible situations (such as all staff meetings). We included expectations (written, video, & short orientation) into onboarding for new employees. We had ongoing training exercises for all current employees. We had touch points with managers to offer support and ensure follow through with direct reports. Plus we built expectations into a new performance appraisal system.
One of the interventions I had direct responsibility for was facilitating the process of teaching and using more data-based decisions as there had been a culture of using “gut” feelings to make many of the product and business decisions. I did not use a train-the-trainer approach but did incorporate a teach, practice and reflection model with feedback.
After one year we did a follow up outcomes survey to help gauge the success of the project by obtaining employee reactions to the initiative. Overall the survey helped to assess areas where there had been improvement in alignment with company culture as well as pinpoint areas which needed more reinforcement. There were clear areas of a cultural shift in several divisions of the organization. Obtaining this assessment from the participants and being able to integrate this feedback with impressions from senior leaders as well hard data (metrics) obtained during the culture change was very valuable.
In retrospect, a few areas I would have done differently include:
- I would not bundle in with performance management at all. This is one of those “seemed like a good idea at the time” situations. Although this may foster compliance there was feedback indicating this made it a “tick the box” exercise for HR and lessened its overall meaning.
- I believe that even though we had a change team and a charter, that parts of the effort became too defused since we were tackling multiple cultural pieces simultaneously. For example, the data–based decisions and the new communication style were two separate projects but we dovetailed them together which some employees reported that they found very confusing.
- We also could have done more to build in psychological safety. This varied by department, as some areas of the organization were encouraging of experiments and failing fast, while others were punitive of failure. We should have offered more for the areas where needed and less where not needed.
- I could go on but these were my personal Big Three so to speak.
What kind of debriefs do you you do? How do you involve your team? How do you apply them to future projects? Also, I wish I could say we did a premortem, but we did not. Maybe a good premortem would have avoided at least one of these lessons learned. How do you bake in these reflections so that they are incorporated into future initiatives?
P.S. For more information on debriefs, read this cool post by Wendy Hirsch:
Image courtesy of Sira Anamwong at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
