Making It Stick: The Value of Operationalizing Your Company’s Culture

There is no shortage of data proving that strong organizational culture drives success. For example, Bain & Company partners recently reported that companies with high-performance cultures can claim the following statistics over other organizations:

• Ten times the revenue growth
• Five times the total shareholder return
• Five times the earnings before taxes

The mandate for business leaders looking for a competitive advantage is clear: create a great culture. However, introducing an aspirational culture and getting it to take root are not the same thing. Too often, companies engage in culture makeovers that lack traction, fall flat, and leave their workforce disillusioned. To build a robust culture that lasts, leaders must find a way to operationalize it, enabling it to continuously recharge.

What Leaders Need to Know

In a recent Forbes article, Culture Partners Chief Scientist of Workplace Culture Jessica Kriegel suggests leaders ask themselves a critical question as they reflect on their company’s culture: “Is it operationalized or memorialized?” In other words, does it just live in stated core values, or is it the heartbeat of the organization?

Author, professor, and podcaster Brené Brown articulates the pitfalls of relying on values to establish a thriving culture.

“The findings from the research are clear: We can’t live into values that we can’t name, AND living into values requires moving from lofty aspirations to specific, observable behaviors. In our experience, only about 10 percent of organizations have operationalized their values into teachable and observable behaviors that are used to train their employees and hold people accountable.

If you’re not going to take the time to translate values from ideals to behaviors—if you’re not going to teach people the skills they need to show up in a way that’s aligned with those values and then create a culture in which you hold one another accountable for staying aligned with the values—it’s better not to profess any values at all. They become a joke.”

Kriegel recommends that leaders consider whether their company has “established processes so that the company culture advances from ideas to experiences.” They can’t simply articulate what the culture is and expect it to function automatically. Instead, they must create a systematic plan to make culture experiential versus philosophical.

Kriegel challenges leaders to make culture-building processes part of their business strategy. And she stresses the importance of eliciting buy-in from their employees.

“Communication and transparency are key to these processes. Management must convey strategy and desired results to team members, as well as the role each person plays in achieving those results. Have frameworks been established to help everyone recognize how culture impacts business results?”

What Leaders Need to Do

Leaders should evaluate their organization and workforce before they try to implement a culture initiative. In an article for Forbes, Bain & Company’s Managing Partner David Michels recommends that CEOs consider six questions in their quest to change and operationalize their company’s culture.

1. How many of our existing cultural artifacts (purpose statements, values, and behaviors) need to change?
2. What existing elements of the culture should absolutely not be touched?
3. As we launch, how clear is the organization on how the culture needs to change?
4. How much alignment is needed among our leadership team?
5. How likely are our people to buy into this culture change?
6. Will certain parts of the organization struggle with this change more than others?

Working through these issues will help leaders gain a deeper understanding of what it will take to succeed.

Keynote speaker and CEO of CX Journey Inc. Annette Franz takes the process further in a recent Forbes article, offering six steps for leaders to define, socialize, and operationalize company culture.

1. Define Behaviors
   Franz recommends identifying behaviors associated with the company’s values to provide context for employees so they can “translate them into how they do business.”
2. Define Outcomes
   In this step, Franz suggests articulating desired outcomes of operationalizing values versus what happens when employees don’t lean into these behaviors.
3. Communicate the Values
   Leaders should employ various methods to spread the word to staff about how to live up to company values.
4. Model the Values
   The executive team must demonstrate a commitment to the values and be role models for the associated behaviors.
5. Reinforce the Values
   Beyond incentives, rewards, and recognition, Franz recommends reinforcing the values by hiring for a cultural fit and using them in performance reviews.

CultureWise CEO David J. Friedman drills deeper into the methodology of operationalizing company culture. He points out that while values may serve a purpose, they may only cover some of the behaviors leaders would like their staff to perfect.

“There are quite likely some behaviors that are really important to our success that fall outside the scope of the values we’ve identified.” By limiting people’s attention to only the behaviors tied to values, leaders miss enforcing other behaviors that address practical work habits. Friedman also leans away from stressing values because they are subject to interpretation, whereas behaviors can be explicitly defined so everyone is on the same wavelength.

In his book Culture by Design, Friedman offers an eight-step framework showing leaders how to leverage behaviors to create a concrete plan for building and sustaining a high-performance culture.

1. Define the employee behaviors that drive your success.
   Friedman doesn’t just recommend that leaders identify and name the behaviors they want to see in their culture. He also urges them to also create definitions, so everyone knows what they look like in action. The behaviors and their definitions become the culture’s common language.
2. Ritualize the practice of these behaviors.
   Friedman uses the term ‘ritual’ to describe a process we do repeatedly until it becomes a habit. He explains how leaders can create rituals to help their staff internalize the behaviors, so they become second nature.
3. Select the people who are the right fit for your culture.
   When hiring new staff, leaders should use their company’s cultural behaviors as a barometer. This practice fortifies the culture and helps retention because recruits feel they belong on the team.
4. Integrate new hires into your culture.
   Friedman uses the word ‘integrating’ to describe the onboarding process because it reflects assimilating new hires into the organizational culture—not just orientating them to their jobs.
5. Communicate your culture throughout your organization.
   The more employees hear about the behaviors that form their company’s culture, the more they will sink in. Leaders should continuously communicate the culture’s essence in multiple ways.
6. Coach to reinforce your culture.
   Managers should leverage the culture to provide feedback and guidance. This reinforcement of behaviors can happen in scheduled sessions and even more frequently in impromptu teachable moments.
7. Lead your culture by example.
   Friedman emphasizes that for a push to operationalize culture to work, it must be championed by leadership throughout the organization. Leaders at all levels must walk the talk and exemplify the behaviors.
8. Drive your culture through accountability.
   This step demonstrates a company’s commitment to living out the prescribed behaviors. Friedman advises leaders to utilize employee surveys, performance reviews, and other tools to help people adhere to their organization’s cultural standards.

Friedman and the other experts cited above agree that operationalizing culture isn’t a short-term initiative leaders can activate and turn their attention elsewhere. It is an ongoing effort that requires daily involvement and commitment. But the returns on this investment of time and effort are abundant.

The Benefits of Operationalizing Culture

Having an inconsistent culture creates hit-or-miss outcomes. But an operationalized culture, built on purposeful and impactful systems and processes, yields steady rewards.

Operationalized culture benefits include:

• Consistency
  Employees are aligned in their understanding and performance of culture-specific behaviors.
• Recruitment
  A well-defined and high-functioning culture is a magnet for top job candidates.
• Retention
  Employees are more vested, engaged, and fulfilled in a supportive, productive work environment.
• Performance
  Cultural alignment empowers workers to collaborate effectively, leading to a higher level of productivity and efficiency.
• Company reputation
  An operationalized culture has a positive external impact because it radiates high standards, leading to increased trust and loyalty from customers and other stakeholders.

An operationalized culture creates a continuous cycle of motivation, performance, and growth that drives long-term success.

Business leaders will always face unstable factors that influence their companies, like market trends, regulatory changes, supply differentials, and economic turbulence. However, organizations that systematically institutionalize a strong culture are better equipped to weather volatile or even adverse situations.

Their efforts also provide them with a lasting differentiator that sets them apart from competitors regardless of market conditions. By building a powerful operationalized culture, leaders create an undiminishable advantage.