Culture Change... and WHY???

When you open the internet today looking for jobs, you will find loads of job postings with the key words "culture & change". Mostly these positions are related to the HR departments, what is not completely wrong, but also not perfectly right.

Sure, it is all about people when it comes to culture. Culture, however, has nothing to do with technical stuff; it's about emotions and humans, visions, missions and fundamental rules to create a society that can achieve goals!

But let's start from the beginning. Why is there such a strong need today to change a companies culture?

We are living today almost 20 years after the millennial change. Remember? We were scared that all the computers break down and the world would stand still because of that. That was a big thing these days. But there was even more. Already in 2000 the majority of the global population owned a mobile phone with internet, so was able to gain global information. This huge increase of the ability to inform ourselves lead into a completely different mindset of the people on this globe. This can be seen on the news every day. That Donald Trump became president is only one signal that times have changed, but also Greta Thunberg from Sweden and her Friday for future demonstrations with an already global scale show us, that times have changed pretty radical.

Companies all over the world making these experiences today and wonder, why business numbers are not as they are supposed to be. If your company culture need to be changed, you can identify by many different signals within your company:

• The amount of fluctuation, so people coming and going, is high
• The respect for your assets in the company is low, for example the condition of the coffee machine in the office is always dirty and damages can be seen
• The quality level of your product or service is going down, costs for quality is going up
  
• More complaints from your customers
• It is getting harder to win new customers
• Profit targets are not reached
  
• Market share is going down, even when market climate is good for your product
  
• Marketing budgets need to be scaled up to keep up with the competition
• Innovation and inventions need to be purchased from outside
• The knowledge base is hard to maintain within the company
• Many issues with workers councils and unions
• Not really good feedbacks and results in online company evaluation forums
• Survey results (internal and external) are lower than expected

There are many more small hints within your daily business that you might think about restructuring your culture, before you start to restructure your organisation. A culture definition is fundamental. First we need to define WHY we want to play football, HOW we want to play and WHAT we want to achieve. If this is defined, you can create a strong team that drives these values and targets forward.

Changing a culture is harder than creating a culture from scratch. That is for sure. It is a normal thing that cultures need to adapt to the times they are in. Because times are changing and since 60 years even faster than before, existing companies should question their culture on a frequent basis to be sure to adapt to changing environments. If you do not adapt and embrace changes, you might end up like KODAK. They went bankrupt because as the market leader for high quality films, they didn't belief in the quality of digital cameras.

So what can you do when you find topics in the bullet list that matches your business reality? Well, I guess all of these topics can be seen as pain for your company. What do you do when you feel pain and you don't know where it comes from? You go to the doctor! This is what is the best to do to find out where the pain comes from and to create a professional healing treatment. Of course there might be a chance for a self healing as well, unfortunately those attempts mostly end up with more pain. The reason is as simple as logic. You might be already blind through your daily business and occupied with things that drag you away from the fundamentals and when you are the one who always said "left!", it will be hard to belief when all of a sudden you say "right!". But when your doctor tells you to change your life upside-down, you have an obvious reason to follow.

This is WHY a culture change should be defined by the patient (definition of health) and the treatment should be done by the physio therapists, surgeons and medicines (analysis, pulse-check, awareness, trainings, surveys, mentoring).