The Culture Diet: Why So Many Companies Fail To Change Their Culture

It’s January 2nd. Your alarm goes off at 5am. You get dressed, grab a protein bar, a water, and head to the gym. You work out for an hour, grab a healthy smoothie afterwards and head to work. At lunch you have a salad, and for dinner you have a dinner of grilled chicken and broccoli. You feel great. You feel motivated. Today is the start of the new you. This is going to last.

Or so you thought. By mid-February you’re getting up at 7am, grabbing a latte and a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich from Starbucks on your way in to work, and back to the one or two drinks a night routine.

This is the story for so many people. A new year brings new goals and new ambitions. But diets and lifestyle health changes are hard to maintain. They fail because we never see diets as long-term solutions but rather a way for short-term fixes, and we see the way we used to live as a lot easier than continuing the new changes.

It’s the same issue organizations struggle with when they try their hand at culture change. It begins with a culture survey, an all-company meeting to discuss and share the results, a commitment to make changes, a culture committee to reassess the mission and values, and a vague plan to make things better. Everyone feels excited for a month; employees feel like they have finally been heard, and leadership feels they’ve done the right thing.

Six months later, things end up back to how they were before. Employees feel disengaged, the culture committee only meets periodically to plan the next month’s Friday happy hour, and leadership is busy tackling the current fire that needs to be put out.

I see this happen with too many companies. It’s not that leadership doesn’t care about culture or that the ideas of change are bad. It comes down to a failure around strategy, structures, and execution. It comes down to the fact that reverting back to old ways is almost always easier than sticking with the new plan.

It comes down to the idea that companies approach culture change with the same mentality as a diet.

Inherently, diets are never long-term focused or about lifestyle changes. Diets are built around a finite amount of time until you can get back to how you normally operate. “Whole30”, “10-Day Juice Cleanse”, “Dry January”, “6-Week Paleo Challenge”.

They aren’t about changing the structure and habits of your life but rather hoping for quick solutions.

Organizations set their culture change initiatives up for failure from the beginning because they address their culture issues like a diet instead of a lifestyle change. The reality is that in order to sustainably change your culture, you must think of it as exactly that: a full commitment to depart from how you used to do things to how you will do things moving forward. Creating a new culture isn’t a 6-week challenge, it’s a new standard operating procedure for your people.

If organizations want to see real culture change, if they want to increase employee engagement, reduce turnover, drive profitability, and create a place where people are proud to work, then the goal must be to not approach culture discussions as quick fixes but rather long-term operational changes.

The focus must be more than ‘do we have the right values? Do we have the right open floor plan?’, but rather on ‘have we established the right behaviors, incentives, and structures that align to our goals and mission? Have we created a path to keep people accountable?’

This type of change is difficult because it requires intentionality day in and day out. It requires clear understanding of the culture you want to become, and accountability for everyone involved. But here is the amazing thing: it works. Small changes every day lead to amazing results over time. Want to be on the ‘Best Places to Work’ list? Stop looking at culture like a diet and rather as the new standard for how your organization operates. The work starts today.

Want to begin a real culture discussion within your organization. I can help. Email me at patrick@changepointconsulting.com for information.