Everything will change, but people come first

Every company needs a clear promise for its customers and for its employees, but the bigger challenge we set our clients is to create a culture where these individuals can support each other.

No two cultures are the same. Amazon champions extreme customer service, making it a hard-nosed place to work. John Lewis has built a cooperative mindset over a hundred years so that each employee sees the other as a partner. Both are incredible retailers with much-loved brands. Each has a culture that works for them.

So a value proposition between employer and staff can’t be a cookie-cutter process. If it borrows too heavily from ‘best practice’ it settles for platitudes like ‘working together’ or ‘trustworthy’. These kind of generics really bother me because they’re fundamentals. Do you want to trust your employer? Well, duh. They’re expected by every human being on the planet, and no more useful than saying ‘we want food’. It could well be that trust is an issue that needs addressing, but if that’s where you start and finish then you’ll have cultural ambition that is little more than a borderline personality disorder built by a computer.

So at Wolff Olins we’ve been working on tools that drive a valuable and unique brand deep into the organisation. We help clients get into the business of creating tangible, powerful moments of change that bring the purpose to life every day. Our model of change creates behavioural shifts in a way that is visible, desirable and effective. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this process it’s that the little things matter — grand statements set a direction, but it is the informal, emotive moments of change that resonate. Like when 2,800 Expedia engineers sign a 20-foot-high manifesto with silver pens and a lot of noisy, happy chatter.

But first, you need a clear statement of ambition for your culture. Not just a tagline, but a description of the behaviours that are going to create the impact you want to achieve. It is how you hold all your culture activities accountable. We take the time to get really clear on the promise the company makes to customers, and the promise it makes to employees.

A traditional employee value proposition stops there but we go a step further: we clarify the promise between employees and customers. This contract gives everybody a role, it spurs recruitment and retention activities, and it identifies ways to bring the purpose to life in the hands of the people who matter.

For example, our work with Orange means the leadership now has a clear ambition for employees to be accountable to customers, and an engagement program that puts this experience in the hands of the frontline. It empowers employees to deliver the company’s new listening brand — and compels the business to provide the necessary tools for its people to listen and do something with what they hear.

A promise like this creates an incredibly powerful platform of employees and customers collaborating in service of something greater than themselves: a shared goal, like a simpler life, or a braver use of technology, or a smarter understanding of money.

And that means it never calcifies. Society doesn’t stand still so culture doesn’t stand still. We want our clients to grow a beating cultural heart that is continually adapting, one that helps people continue to help people as life changes, one of empowered individuals working towards the empowerment of other individuals.

Now, who wants to work for that company?

This post was originally published on our blog by Morgan Holt. We invite you to share your thoughts in the comments section and — as always — to get in touch if you’d like to talk to us about bringing creativity to your party.