Culture Shift: Context and Organizational Culture Change

“We can learn more from past projects than we realize, but we should remember that context matters”

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Are most professionals doing debriefs after a project? One would hope so. An opportunity to debrief increases performance (Tannenbaum et al 2012) regardless whether you are an HR professional, project manager or organization development practitioner. It certainly works for me. Here is an example of a debrief after a culture change project.

The Culture Shift Project

We had an organizational culture change initiative with three prongs: This was in a small non-profit with less than 500 employees in the US midwest to

1. Actively engage all employees to use data-based decisions
2. To increase open reciprocal communication
3. To take more risks.

These were key steps we took in the project team:

• We conducted a baseline study interviewing leadership to obtain their perspective of the current company culture, and how they envisioned a future state. Qualitative data was used to help develop a custom survey of all employees.
• We then executed this survey to get a snapshot of how employees saw the current company culture. The response rate was very good (> 70%) and included qualitative information in addition to the quantitative. The staff knew these were high priority initiatives. I was directly responsible for designing, executing, and reporting the results of the survey.
• We had two offsite retreats to help employees understand new expectations and to obtain ownership of the planned changes at all levels of the organization. Although the project idea (such as the new communication guidelines) was driven primarily by upper management we actively worked to solicit ideas from all employees. They may not be able to determine the “what”, but we wanted to maximize their opportunity to have input on the “how”.
• We had a designated person who was teaching the new communication style expectations. These centered on common active listening techniques such as paraphrasing, reflecting, and repeating back. However, we were also encouraging employees to tell each other if they thought an expectation was not realistic, regardless if it was with a supervisor or another employee in a different department. The goal was to give employees clearer job expectations and to enhance psychological safety at all levels of the organization. For example: “Sam, I need you to get this task done on Tuesday.” “Oh well, Dean, Tuesday cannot work as I am working on that other big project for the director, but I can get it to you on Friday, will that work?” “Ah, well okay Sam, I really NEED it by Thursday, could you make that happen? “Sure Dean, I can make Thursday happen.” “Thursday it is, thanks Sam!”

We integrated expectations for reciprocal communication and data-based decisions into organizational culture. The CEO (and senior directors) role- modeled behaviors in highly visible situations (such as “all staff” meetings). We included expectations (written, video, & short orientation) into on-boarding 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 cool interventions I had direct responsibility for was facilitating the process of teaching and using more data-based decisions. There had been a culture of using “gut” feelings to make many of the product and business decisions as opposed to encouraging a data-based decision-making process. I did not use a train-the-trainer approach but did incorporate a teach, practice, and reflection piece with feedback.

After one year we did a follow-up outcomes survey to help gauge the success of the project. Overall the survey helped to identify where there had been improvement in alignment with company culture as well as to pinpoint the areas that needed more reinforcement. We found that there were clear signs of a cultural shift across the organization. Obtaining this assessment allowed us to do a pre-post comparison on the dimensions of organizational culture. We integrated this feedback with input from senior leaders as well as metrics obtained during the culture change.

Lessons Learned
Five key areas that I would do differently if I could go back in time

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1. We had put in features to ensure managers and direct reports indicated follow through. This was a necessary but not sufficient condition for merit increases. For example, employees needed to document they had completed the data-based decisions and had used the new process in a business context. This is one of those “seemed like a good idea at the time” situations. Although this may foster compliance there was feedback from employees indicating this made it a “tick the box” exercise for the Human Resources department and lessened its overall meaning.
2. Even though we had an organizational culture change team and a charter, parts of the effort became confusing for employees 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. Some employees reported that they found this very confusing. How were the two related? Technically they were not related. They were simply both part of a larger project, and that was not naturally clear
3. We also could have done more to build in psychological safety. There was too much variation by department: some areas of the organization were encouraging of experiments and failing fast, while others were punitive of failure. We should have offered more support and training (communication skills, conflict resolution, facilitation of team meetings etc.) for the departments where needed and less services where not needed.
4. Since we were making fundamental changes to the way employees interacted and the way decisions were made, we also should have paid more attention to the organizational design. We did not rewrite policies and procedures, and there were no changes to the structure of the organization. We also did not really evaluate if a new operating model was needed and, in retrospect, we should have done more to determine if structural interventions would have helped with the changes.
5. Finally, we did not do a premortem. Maybe a good premortem would have avoided at least one of these lessons learned. Although the project team did talk about areas that could go wrong, a more formal and structured premortem could have helped to more realistically prepare for obstacles to the culture shift project. We could have also more fully determined if we were changing the organizational culture, or a areas of organizational climate.

Doing a debrief after a project is finished can feel like a waste of time, especially if the next project is already demanding your attention. But as my experience here illustrates, there is a lot to be learned, even if the project was pretty successful on the whole.

Much of our personal development as practitioners comes from capitalizing on our own experiences. Make a habit of doing a postmortem after each project. Debriefing rules!

(written by Paul Thoresen and Koen Smets)

References

Edmondson, A., & Lei. (2014). Psychological Safety: The History, Renaissance, and Future of an Interpersonal Construct Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 1:1, 23–43.

Tannenbaum, S. I., & Cerasoli. C. P. (2012). Do Team and Individual Debriefs Enhance Performance? A Meta-Analysis. Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 55.1.

A previous version of this post appeared here on Medium.